I’ve found that -Openness- to options and possibilities that you haven’t thought of often lead you to a superior answer.
When I think of open, I think of standing somewhere way up in the mountains in Colorado or New Mexico or California. You can see so far and so wide out into the world, from above.
I try to remember those views, the feeling they gave, and use them when I’m not on top of a mountain.
I had boss say to me early in my career, “Just be who you are, quit trying to be someone else.”
At the time it really pissed me off. Who the hell did he think he was giving me pop psychology?Maybe someone had just told him that so he was projecting. Screw him, I thought. What an asshole.
However, over the many, many years since he told me that, it’s echoed in my mind a hundred times. It’s probably the best piece of wisdom he ever gave me.
So I check myself every once in a while now.
This time we are currently in is temporary, yet it will change us permanently in some ways. Sooner than we think it will be gone. For the rest of our lives, we’ll be able to say we went through the Coronavirus, like people who experienced WWII or 9/11.
We are in the middle of a tragedy, and I’m very sad for all the suffering, pain, dying, and general disorientation we now face daily. But I’m also relieved for some of the things this time is giving us. Slow down, quiet, peace, time to reflect and possibly change some things.
Some of the best major changes in life happen as a result of a crisis or great loss. I know, I’ve had my share –– we all have. We can safely now tap into these thoughts, reflect, be honest with ourselves. It’s like repartitioning our hard drive (brain).
Deep down we are all individuals, alone with our most inner thoughts that no one else knows. Usually there’s too much going on to stop and truly think about life. When an opportunity does present itself to shut off the noise –– on a hike, meditating, in our own backyard thinking.
As the world is now starting to “open up” again, this unique time will be gone forever. So make the most of it.
It will be back to the noise and grind and hustle. Will it be different? Most likely. But it won’t be as peaceful as it is right now.
So use what you have left to study who you really are, what you really want.
If you’re reading Linkedin on a Saturday. you’re probably thinking about it. One way to start the change is to adjust your speed, even a little bit. Whether up or down, the change flushes out the cache in your brain and gives you new energy.
Right now we’re all slowing it down. I think that’s a good thing, breaking the zombie patterns we’ve all been in for so long, slogging our way through life’s daily routines. It’s all been stopped now, for the first time ever in our lives. Amazing.
I’ve had many times in my life when it was a good time to slow down, usually after an intense run of a few years in a growing company. When helping companies to grow faster and grow correctly without blowing up, my pattern is usually a lot of travel, a lot talking, frenetic schedules, pushing as hard as feasible on several parameters.
I see posts from people in different phases of their career where they advocate one of the above — “You need to speed it up” or “You need to slow it down” or “ Work Harder” or “Work Less”. Or “Here’s how to meditate” or “Drink More Coffee!!”
The truth is that it’s different for everyone based on where they are in their own cycle of life. Almost every time after slowing down for a few months, taking a well need rest for my mind and body, I realize it’s time to speed it back up, get out there more. I’m always surprised and have to psych myself into speeding up again. Moving slower and becoming more present and silt can become intoxicating. But it doesn’t “pay the bills” as they say.
Many years ago, Tim Ferris wrote one of the most popular business books ever, “The Four Hour Work Week”. In it he advocates trimming back the unnecessary busywork thing in life to give yourself more free time. The cover is a drawing of someone lying on a hammock between two palm trees, the iconic vacation lifestyle. With his constant self promotion and social media activity I’m guessing he no longer actually works only fours per week, but I get the point, and was doing many of the things he said for years before his book was published.
I’m famous among my business associates for cutting out any fat from business meetings, conversations, etc. At first it pisses them off, but then a few months or years later they often tell me they “get it”. I don’t believe in business for business’ sake type time wasting meetings.
One hobby/aspiration that helps to slow it down is art. Either making or studying some type of art, especially if it’s non-digital art, will give you a whole different view of your world and compartmentalize work and business. By design many art activities are slow and quiet and contemplative. Pop into a museum in New York or L.A. and everything changes.
So slow it down when you can. Disconnect, meditate, sleep.
Then there are the times when you need to speed it up, move faster, be more productive. After this quarantine is all over, it will take some work for all of us to speed it back up. Our “speed it up” muscles are atrophied a bit.
I enjoy this phase as much as I enjoy slowing it down. Recently I visited a model city of the future, a “smart’ city where they showed us the advances in lifestyle that can increase your productivity through better eating and more exercise, as opposed to drinking Red Bull and working more hours. A smarter way to speed it up. At first I wasn’t sure I agreed but then I kind of got it. Eight hour days at higher productivity instead of twelve hour days with burn out as a result.
Moving faster, steadily increasing your speed, becoming more efficient, being “on” when you need to be. These are all healthy things for your productivity and creativity. many very successful people are called “Manic” types. The manic sessions are where they create, see beyond, and usually bother the people around them. I sometimes get these bursts, try to limit them ,but allow them to take over once in a while. I’m writing this right now because of a creative surge I felt this morning from reading a great article on predictive analytics. I felt that I should not only consume great stories but also try to write something useful, and to do it quickly.
Part of speeding up is to reduce the amount of time spent. Elton John was famous in his early days for spending very little time writing his songs. During the making of the Yellow Brick Road album, h e would receive lyrics for three to five songs every morning from his writing partner Bernie Taupin, then create finished songs within a couple of hours. Many of these songs went on to become his greatest hits.
Slow it down, speed it up. Try being more conscious about doing this and you may find a new rhythm and balance to your life. Enjoy this forced relaxation right now, as we’ll probably never see such a thing again.
tom nora
I’m a startup growth consultant who started a digital marketing + web development agency due to such high demand from my startup clients. I’ve used some local and some offshore resources and avoided larger outsourcing companies. I’ve found the best way to do this is to manage the projects daily.
I’m looking for suggestions on how to scale this using people in europe without adding too many “middle men”.
1. Work directly with engineers, no company involved.
2. They start by demoing their skills on my project at no cost for 1-2 days.
3. Hire them 8 hours at a time and review daily by skype, g hangout. I’ve been acting as project manager/dev manager.
4. work is mostly drupal, wordpress, seo and php/lamp.
People in the Philippines or India or eastern europe are very low cost – $7-10/hour.
I’d like to build a europe based high quality partner agency, but not sure how to build the trust required for both sides. I had a company in europe in the past and was very happy with the quality software we created.
Let me know what you think of this, and please feel free to connect.
Tom Nora
To start off you should focus on working with a company that offers you direct access to engineers and is willing to work as an extended branch for your team. They keep you involved even from the early stages of the value chain including selecting the right engineers and taking direction and input on the future technical growth plan for those engineers. Most of these offshore locations will offer you the leverage to scale as per your needs as per the ample availability of technical talent and a regular pipeline with many STEM students graduating every term. You can also consider working with freelancers but providing them with the right infrastructure and support mechanism needed to produce work at par with engineers stateside would be difficult for you to manage. Also, it is not about the engineering talent only! But other support function that go with that like HR and Administrative support. For this you should focus on finding that right company which is willing to offer you transparency and keeps you in charge of your team. I would also want to mention here that you would also have to focus on building a culture in your team that represents your company’s persona with which your offshore resources can relate to and understand. This will allow you to bring more and more value out of your offshore resources.
If you can manage it, rather than having your unit of workforce as a person (and definitely not a “resource”, that term should be outlawed), try having your unit of workforce the “team” and have relatively stable teams that have learned to work with each other, for whom you know their strengths and weaknesses, and to whom you might be able to augment with people strong in specific skills where the work requires skills in an area that they are weak.
Daily reports via skype are good way to check a person skills for good times, how do you test people in bad times (assuming before they occur).
Secondly I’d like to ask why did you stoped your company back in Europe?
The good thing is, you are using Skype and hangout. There is nothing close to that.
The way I’ve done it when I wanted to grow an organization in China, was to start with a centralized model where I have local reck leads responsible for offshore engineers.
While working on a release, we made sure we are building their skills in all possible roles (Dev, QA, Product Owner, Technical writers etc.).
Our strategy was to move to a distributed model where the entire scrum team works together offshore. Once we got that to work (It took us 1-2 releases) we were able to scale up quickly and grow the offshore organization significantly.
Startup Whisperer, Web Market Development
Ron, Thanks for the info. This started as a tiny project, not meant to grow. In the past I’ve acquired an offshore company in China after working together for about a year, that worked well, gave us the chance to get to know each other and protected our IP.
I guess we’ll see where this one goes.
million dollar question. facing the same issues with finding quality and trustworthy mates that have a common goal rather than count minutes and cents. still have hope. diamond in the rough.
I got to agree with you but partially. I believe quality is not limited to price or a part of world. You can find great resources in India or in any part of the world. Its like hiring a resource once you hire a great resource you never need to worry about it. So my suggestion is to find a good agency that can work with you and check them before starting work with them by giving them some small piece of work and at the price does not matter but quality does mater.
Startup Whisperer, Web Market Development
Abbas and Imran, Thanks for the info. This started as a tiny project, not meant to grow. In the past I’ve acquired an offshore company after working together for about a year, that worked well, gave us the chance to get to know each other and protected our IP.
I guess we’ll see where this one goes. Lot’s of suggestions to go ahead and try to build something.
Yes Abbas, that’s the problem, many agencies don’t care enough about the buisness/product. Not their fault, but one of the reasons I’ve avoided that route.
Here’s the first part of his note and his bio:
Tom, I need a job. My background is corporate finance and I’ve worked for the best electronic parts wholesale, a top three cable company, and the #1 online bank (PayPal).
And my response:
Eric, I see a lot of people going through this, myself included. Times are worse than I’ve ever seen if you’re not already in a great position. The idea of j-o-b has become harder to get, you have to think in terms of your own brand instead. I’m actually writing a book about this right right now.
It looks like you have lots of energy, and you’re reaching out, you need to channel it into $$$. Also, Avnet is a great background to have.
I usually see everything as a startup, so you look like a finance startup to me. I’ve spent a lot of time recently in the world of e-commerce, it’s an mazing market growing quickly. I’d focus on that if I were you.
Here are some thoughts:
– Are you currently working at PayPal? You could be a paypal consultant and have a pretty strong business.
– E-commerce technologies are very hot right now
– check out commerceguys.com (Drupal)
– woocommerce (WordPress).
Within those companies or similar have many job openings. Or, expertise here can get you some type of work.
– Keep networking and stay positive, negative attitude will scare people off.
– Start a blog about your experience and about online finance. That will help.
– give before you get. Find ways to help others before approaching them asking for something.
I could list plenty more, but that would probably just frustrate you. None of the above is a job, they’re all just ways to hustle to try to get a job.
Let me know how it goes.
TN
I could rubber stamp this answer to many people I hear from ,but usually I don’t even answer. In looking for a higher leverage way to solve this, I’m using my channels to try to broadcast this topic and help many at once.
Job boards are broken, resume robots are broken, so real humans need to get back into the process. If you want to be involved contact me; otherwise, stay tuned here for more. TN @tomnora
Hello Tom, I can answer your questions. I have been able to successfully scale three different software development service centers offshore. You are right about the need for TRUST. You absolutely have to have a person in each service center that you TRUST. You have to know that they have your back in good times and bad times. If you have that one person in each center, then you can easily scale your service center around them and go as high as you want to go. You will need managers, top notch infrastructure and of course eventually an HR team for recruiting, policy enforcement, policy making, benefits coordination and general HR duties.
However, the first step is getting that one person you can trust. I have experience in doing this and can give you more insight if you wish.