Yahoo's work from home ban has a purpose

Last week Marissa Mayer banned working from home at Yahoo. Journalists have taken talked about how Mayer used VPN data to see whether people were working or not. I believe that is irrelevant and only the way to do what she had to do to get company on track.

My guess is that Yahoo had grown to be a company full of workers not motivated enough to really make changes. I believe there has been too many workers not committed to make their best. Now Marissa Mayer have given a message to the company: "be committed to a common goal or please leave".

Other possibility Marissa Mayer had was to lay off people. Bad thing about laying off people is that, some of the good guys will go with the flush and some of the bad ones will still remain. Now the ones who want to slack, can leave to another company. And them who really want to take part to the future of Yahoo will stay.

Quote from claimed Yahoo's leaked memo

I believe what Marissa Mayer did is a part of greater plan to get the company back on track. I want to believe it's not really about working from home, but it is about the situation at Yahoo and what had to be done.

I know I would have been pissed off by the announcement Marissa Mayer had to do. I know I wouldn't currently, with two small kids, work in a company that wouldn't allow working from home. And to be exact, Yahoo's announcement didn't fully ban working from home, but banned the agreements that people would work from home. Occasional working from home would be allowed, with "best judgement".

It's easy to analyse the situation outside and either judge or agree with Mayer's decision. We do not know the truth behind the situation. At least Mayer has made a bold move on something that is not within the standards in the industry. Now we'll wait for the consequences in the future.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

We Are Not Responsible For Lost Or Stolen Valuables - Why?

Lobbies of so many companies have the sign "We Are Not Responsible For Any Lost Or Stolen Valuables" next to their coat rack. It has always bothered me. I'm coming to visit your company, and you ask me to leave my jacket and stuff here. Then you state that no, we will not make sure it will be safe here.

So what if a company would actually take the responsibility of the jackets and stuff. I know the lawyers would say, that it's too much of a risk to take the responsibility of property of others. Is it really? For me that would actually state that this company is different and can be trusted. It would be an act of kindness and trustfulness to take care of my jacket and stuff while I'm visiting there.

For so many companies, the risk is actually such a minimal, that it would really have any financial effect whatsoever to company's result.

Why companies couldn't think differently and be kind? Why every company always need to cover their backs for everything? Why every company needs to be made from the same mold?

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

In IT need for business case means no business case

I've come to a conclusion, that when an IT investment needs a business case to prove its existence or purchase, then it is not worth of it.

When IT investment is good enough, everyone will know its benefits and it will help the company to operate better than previously. When main arguments for acquiring a software is that it will save money from somewhere, its not really worth of investement.

I'm not saying money doesn't matter. Of course there needs to be considerations how much IT or SW investments costs, but that shouldn't ever be the driving force for any investment. If it is, company getting the SW or IT might be in trouble soon.

Great companies have the best tools for their internal development and processes. They never settle for the most cost effective ones. They search for the best ones out there. Sometimes those are the cheapest ones, sometimes more expensive ones. Sometimes those are out of the box, sometimes tailored for the company and sometimes company has to create those themselves. The important factor is the value those bring to the company, not the price tag.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Book review - The Innovator's Dilemma by Clayton M. Christensen

The Innovator's Dilemma has been stated to be business literature classic. Book by Clayton M. Christensen has been quoted in many books I have read and I wanted to know what it is all about.

Innovator's Dilemma as a title is bit misleading. Book is really about organizations and technology change and development. In there is the problem called Innovator's Dilemma, but for me at least it was a bit of surprise. I had thought book would tell more about innovation as individuals, but it is all about organizational abilities to adapt to innovation.

Book is thorough. It really tells the history of couple of industries and dives in to the root causes of the problems. I appreciate that it is based on facts, but I would have not needed to know those in such a detail level. It is more of a school book than a self learning book.

Nevertheless the criticism about writing style and readability, book contents are great. It really explains well why same organizations that prosper in sustaining technologies can't keep up with disruptive technologies. There's lot of excellent and interesting insights that really helps understanding organizations and businesses better.

It's a controversial book in that sense. It's a book I'm really happy I did read, but on the other had, it was quite boring to read time to time. I would love that someone would have taken this book to 2010 and written it in more interesting way.

This is a must read for anyone making business and organizational decisions in large scale. I bet they all know the book, but somehow the same things happen all the time. New small companies come in and steal the market from the old players. This book explains why.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Team day activity - Real life human hunt

I with few others were assigned to arrange team day with quite low budget. It was also stated, that it should be something that wasn't done before. The list of what they had done before, was quite a long one.

After brainstorming a bit, we got the idea of a getaway. We would escape from rest of the group and let the others to wonder where and what is going to happen. The we would start giving hints and tips where we are and what we are doing. The idea was that they would start chasing us and after finding we would move together to arranged place to eat and party.

We looked for different alternatives how to actually make the idea happen. We realized we need a app with which we could share our location and others could follow. We started to look from Foursquare and other location share apps to find a perfect one, but none of those actually did the trick. Finally one day we hit to an app called Glympse which was a perfect match for our needs. With Glympse we could share our exact location in a map for 10 minutes and then disappear totally.

In order to make this hunt even better, we made a blog to blogger, which we the fugitives and the hunters could post photos and text on the fly. This would give a little spice to the hunt.

At the scheduled team day, none of the others knew what was going to happen. About an hour before the team was scheduled to start, we the fugitives one by one left the office. Then 14:55, 5 minutes before the team day start, we send a mail to the rest of the group: "Team day has been kidnapped". We stated that we decided to keep the party ourselves and tell you later what it was like. We wanted to give them one change: for the next 2 hours, we will be appearing for 10 minutes via Glympse every 20 minutes. If they could find us within that 2 hours, they could join the party.

Idea and execution worked perfectly. We were bit afraid that, would our people actually be playful enough to start chasing us. That worry was unnecessary. First chasers started chasing from our first 14:55 mail,5 minutes before the chase start. We deliberately attached a photo to the first mail, which had a hint of our location. Of course that was a trick from our end to get some of the hunters to leave to wrong direction. That worked out perfectly.

The whole thing worked out perfectly. One group of hunters got us quite fast, but some had to use more than an hour to catch us. It was a fun team day and I recommend to try it out. It's a fun way to spend some time outside and playing a real life game.


Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Communication flaws - Center of a universe effect

It is really common that companies think that they are much more important than they really are. I've seen it happen almost with every company I've worked with. Companies often think, that everyone is interested on them, tries to find their secrets and their products are the most important in the world. I call this center of a universe effect.

This effect is a real problem with many companies. It can be seen in presentations, websites and basically with any communication. Companies think that their brands and products are in a center of universe and they need to tell every little detail of their doings to everyone. This is where they go wrong. Communication should be focused on basics and delivering the most important aspects, not all the minor details. The few companies, like Apple, who could be said to be in the center of the universe, they seem to still focus on telling only the most important things. Maybe that's their secret.

The same goes with secrecy. Companies tend to use millions of Euros for keeping things secret. That's so funny, since there isn't that many companies who's doings are so important, that exposing those secrets would actually make any difference to anyone. Sure many companies have something they consider competitive advantage and want to keep it secret, but most often they are really exaggerating how interesting their secrets really are.

Companies should learn that they are not in the center of a universe. Communication should start from basics and focus on the basics. Definitely there are company fanboys, that want to learn more than just ordinary people, but communication shouldn't be focusing on them, but on the basics. Even big and well known companies need to focus on telling what their product is for. Too often companies think that everyone already knows them and their products and waste time on communicating details that other end doesn't understand due to lack of basic knowledge.

Center of universe effect is related to business jargon. When these two are put together we get presentations in conferences, articles in web and printed brochures that no one really understands. I'm sure you have read or seen these ones. For example someone can speak for 30 minutes without people understanding a word. The same goes with articles, there can be 20 pages about a subject in a such a strange point of view that no one really understands anything. This would be fine if those would be meant for specific audience, but in many cases those are for potential customers. And if potential customers don't understand what you are saying, you are in trouble.

Anyone who is related to communication or sales inside a company know what I'm talking about. It's so easy to slip on the other side of line, to believe that others know every piece of you. Just remember, you are not the center of the universe.
Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

How to survive in big companies

My time with Nokia and Accenture is now over. I recently moved to a much smaller company called Contribyte. I've never been a career driven person as such, but I've still had the luxury to get in to some really interesting projects in my time with Nokia. What I mean, is that I've never made big plans about my career and I don't work to have career, but I actually work to enjoy work and have a decent income for my family. Still I've always got to better positions and bigger projects all the time. Based on what has worked for me, I wanted to share couple of thoughts and tips on how to survive in big companies.

First tip: You can't win all the fights

In big companies there's always bureacracy and processes, that you don't like or see the sense. Many of those will cause you some extra work and also are annoying. Don't waste your time trying to fix all of those. It's easier to agree with some of the processes which are not important for you and go with flow. Then on the other hand, fight the fights that are important for you. When you notice something that is really causing more harm than benefit, make noise about it. Try to understand for what purpose the process is there for the first place, and then try to invent better ways to fulfill the original need.

Second tip: Be consistent

In big companies, there are lots of busy people. Some of them are really busy, some of them are just busy being important. What's common for these people is that they don't truely listen. You can introduce important information or issue to them, but they ignore it, due to they are not really listening in the reception mode. They are just listening, because that's what people are supposed to do. So be consistent and even stubborn. Be sure that information or issue that is important in your opinion, gets truely understood by the ones, that need to understand it. If they then ignore the issue, that might be fine, but then at least they are aware and understand the issue.

And for some issues, you might want to raise noise with many channels. If you feel that issue is understood by those in responsible of it and still they don't act on it, you should raise the issue in other channels. One way is to go to their bosses, but that's a longer and harder way. Easier way is to use social channels of your company. Most of companies seem to have intra with blogs, discussion areas or some other social channels. Test your thinking there to see if others agree on the importance or not. If they do, then you have tools to raise it again or let others to do it.

If your issue or information don't make a change in the company, be a good loser. You are not in charge of the company, and you will not get all of your thoughts trough. Lift your head up and continue with next subjects.

Third tip: Learn the tools

This might be one of the most important things to loosen your stress at the office. Also this is the thing that is most complained at the office. The fact is, that some of the tools always suck. They just don't seem feasible for some tasks or are inconvienable to work with. The best thing you do, is to learn to use those. All the tools are easy to learn and those will actually have some features that make sense.

Learning to use company tools will make your days easier. It will also make you the person, who knows how to use tools and can help others on those. It's a win in the long run. So don't whine and fight against the tools, but just learn those.

Tip four: Be transparent

In big companies it's better to communicate to too many, than to too few. This will increase the email waste, but it will keep people happy. Those guys who complain that they are getting too much email, often love to get the email. They want to be aware and kept in loop. It's better to include even the guys who you know that might not be supporting your ideas quite early. That way they don't have the luxury at the end to start arguying that they wasn't aware of this. All the information will get to them at some point, so it's better to include them early than trying to hide information from them.
  
Tip five: Understanding is the key

This is not really related to big companies only, but it's more generic working guideline. Never work for items you don't understand. If you don't understand why you are doing something, seek for understanding as long as you do. That's the only way to get job properly done.

Be also willing to share understanding to all whom might ask and all you think would benefit from the information. This will help you to understand even more and it will make sure that they will share important information with you on the next time.

Tip six: Make friends

I have to say I hate networking on it's worse. Random people are gathering names and cards of random people. That's not real networking. What I mean is really making friends. Using few extra minutes with people will make a difference in the long run. Really listening and discussing with people will pay off. But you must be real. Everyone can detect a fake person, just networking with you, but you must really care about who the other is and what is her interests. That doesn't require lot's of time, but it requires you to care. Friends will help in big companies a lot, if you are planning to stay any longer.

Tip seven: Concentrate

In big companies you can get asked to do lots of work which are really not that important. Learn to detect what really makes a difference, which really are the tasks that needs to be done properly. Then the rest you can leave undone. I know, that in reality there are tasks you don't think are important, but you must for some political reason do. So learn to do those in ease, a bit lighter way than the really important tasks.

In big companies there are people who look like really busy all the time. They complain about the lack of time all the time. Quite often they just lack the skill to concentrate to the important. Hours won't increase in the day and long working hours are not really increasing productivity. Best thing is to really learn to concentrate on the essentials.

Tip eight: Learn to live with noise  

What ever companies do with their communication solutions, one thing won't change; there will be more and more information flying around available for every person to catch. There will always be multiple communication channels in use. Even some companies are thinking on solutions to the noise, the only real way is to learn to live with it. There will be always more information available and pushed for you than what you can handle. You need to learn to pick the right pieces of information from the huge flow of information. It's not easy, but tools and practices will help you there. Try different things out to find what is the most suitable for you.

Tip nine: Be yourself

This again it's not only for big companies, but it's still a valuable lesson. You can't change yourself due to work mates or processes. You need to learn your way to be yourself with your own priorities and working habits in your working environment. That's the only way to be truely happy at work. And you must be truely happy at work, because that's such a big part of your life.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Book review - Inside Steve's brain - expanded edition

I read book about Steve Jobs and Apple written by Leander Kahney. Book's name was Inside Steve's brain. Copy I had was an extended edition of this book. I figured out from the name, that the book would really dig into mindset of Steve Jobs. I knew that writer Leander Kahney didn't have the permission from Steve Jobs for this book, but still I assumed he had second hand material which would open up the mind of one interesting technology leader.

I have to start with the negative side of the book. It promises in the name that it would be "inside Steve's brain" and would really tell why Steve Jobs behaves as he does, what are his motives and driving forces. Unfortunately this is not what the book really is about. Book really is an entertaining and excellent one, but it doesn't really fulfill it's promise from the name. I expected it to be different than it was, but when I got over the disappointment, I realised there's lot of good in this book.

If you admire Apple products, like most of us do, this is the book that tells more about how Apple creates it's products. It tells about excellent people and their processes to create these innovative and cool looking products of theirs. It could almost work as a bible for those who believe that Apple's way of building products is the best and only way. It really gives lot of food for thought about importance of design, product thinking, innovation and clear focus, when creating products.

I specially loved the parts where it told how innovations and designs are created at Apple. Innovation and beautiful designs don't just come from great thinkers, but they need hard work and lots of iterations even from some of the best guys in the planet.

For guys creating any types of products, you should be aware how Apple has done theirs. Understanding that methodology will give you good ideas how to improve your own organisation on improving the ways you create products. That's the reasoning I would sell this book to you if not an Apple fanboy. If you are, then I guess I don't need to sell it to you.

I have to admit I was hoping the book to be more about Steve Jobs. This book was mainly about Apple, which for some might equal to Steve Jobs, but not for me. I've found Mr. Jobs personality and experience such an interesting, that I hope to find more about that on the soon to come book Steve Jobs.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Learnings and tips from crowdsourcing project within company

Couple weeks ago I was asked to start up a crowdsourcing type of project inside the company. I was given sponsorship from our management, but I had to recruit the people myself and organize the actual work myself. I really liked the challenge and got up to speed quickly. I had only couple of weeks to finish this and I knew I had to get couple hundred people working on this on voluntary basis.

Now that the project has turned out quite well, I wanted to share my learning's from this journey to you and to analyze and learn from those myself also better. I at least analyze better written than only in my head.

Get it up and running
The first thing was to decide how much preparations I would do before really starting the project. I had basically two alternatives, (1) create proper web or tool based mechanism to divide the the work and create reporting tool or then (2) use good old excel and email based mechanism. Due to limited timeline, I selected the latter one. Within one day from announcing the project, I already had tens of people working on the actual work items.

This was a tough choice and I believe in some cases more elegant systems would help on coordinating the work and results. Of course I had a good plan also, just the tools were ancient. I juts believed that in this situation the best thing was to but the wheels running fast. That' was the way to get more time for our volunteers and fast feedback on my methods. So off I went.

Recruiting people
Like said, this was a company internal project and it has it's own challenges on recruiting people to join. I had to get sponsorship from our management (my manager did this for me, thanks for that), but I had to convince line managers around to give this a go and then convince the actual people to join to help a common goal.

Only tip I can say about this phase is, that be honest and transparent. Tell exactly how much of a time it might take from volunteer, what's the timeline and when results are expected. Also be clear what are the prerequisites people have to fulfill to join. And remember to tell the goal of the exercise clearly and understandably. Keys to get people to join are that they understand what they work for and what they exactly need to do.

Walk trough the whole chain
Before you roll up your sleeves and put the ball running; walk the whole chain trough once. What I do first, how do I instruct people, how do I get the results back, what do I do with the results, how the results are shown, who are the key people to know about the results, when this thing will finished and so forth.

Make an easy walk trough of the most important steps you expect you will face during the project. It won't take more than 15-30 minutes for this exercise, but it will definitely help you to see whole.

Test your instructions
This is the part I learned a lot. I made the perfect instructions at first. I looked the subject from many directions, answered all the questions in advance, made pictures with explanations on those and walked through the chain with my instructions. Then I asked few of my colleagues to check those. They found some minor tweaks to those, but after those, the instructions we ready to rock. Or so I thought.

I still decided to take one more cautious step before rolling the instructions to everyone. I decided to use target group for verifying those. When the first voluntaries arrived, I gave the instructions for the first tens of people and paused the roll out for a while. I asked my target group to immediately report any misunderstanding and clarification needs from my instructions. What happened was, that within the first day, I did four major updates to my thought to be perfect instructions. I congratulated myself for using this focus group approach. It turned out I really needed it.

Do not assume
In the first set of instructions I made two assumptions, that (1) some things are common knowledge and  (2) that it is obvious that I expected people to communicate back to me with certain way. Both of those turned out to be false ones.

I learned that I should never assume, that things are commonly known, because me and my close colleagues are familiar with the subject in advance. I had to make updates to my instructions about these really basic issues. I had actually explained the harder parts really well, but then the easy ones I had failed to explain well enough.

Biggest mistake of this whole project was, that I didn't specify the way people should communicate back to me. I assumed everyone would get the idea from my instructions, but it turned out to be quite the opposite. I got contacted with so many different ways and so many different formats, that I had to use lot of time on standardizing the results together. This is where the more advanced reporting tools would have become handy. I made conscious decision to stick with simple tools and get it running faster. It would have easily taken 2-3 days of my project to develop those tools, so I still think I made the right call with excel and email. Next time I just must use more time to explain how I want the results to be communicated to me.

Emphasize possibility to ask for more information
This was a learning from past similar projects. Some people need to be encouraged to ask for more info. Some people are naturally shy and they try to find information from sources they are familiar with. This easily leads to false information due to uncertainties and misunderstandings. So I encourage to put an extra emphasis on ways and possibilities to ask for clarifying questions. Tools like email and IM chat's work well for naturally shyer people.

Friends are the worst ones
I've done these type of projects couple of times in smaller scale and based of those and the project in question, I can tell that friends are the worst ones. Those people who you now quite well and who you do have a relationship with, easily don't obey the deadlines and read the instructions nearly as well enough as the ones you don't know in advance. Somehow the friendship status makes people to be more careless and they don't use the attention needed to successfully complete the tasks given. Of course there are exceptions to this and some friends can be even used for help. Overall I still think that friends are the worst ones in this type of projects. 

Have a realistic schedule
Before making a target schedule for your project, think about the scale. If there's 100 people involved, completing a project in 2 days is a big challenge. From 100 persons, there's easily ten  who come up with something more urgent to deal with and it might be hard to get replacement for so many in such short notice. I don't have any rule of thumb here, but just think of how long the task might take, double it and then give still some buffer. People always works in different ways and different situations.

When you give people a deadline, don't put it to the last day you want it to complete. Have it at least 1 or 2 days in advance and this gives you the possibility to be flexible, when people come to you to ask for more time. They are happy and you will still get your results on time.

Have a good plan of follow-up
As Stephen Covey advised in his book 7 Habits of highly effective people: "Habit 2 - Start with the end in mind", and so you should do here also. Always keep in mind what is the purpose of this all. Is the way people are working the important thing or do you care only about the results. Or are the results actually just a side note and the purpose of this all is to come up with actions from the results. Or are actually the meaning of all this to fix some underlying problem and you are just the step towards it.

So think carefully why it is done and what are the things you need to care for most. There's going to be problems in the way that something doesn't go as planned, or some results might not be as accurate as you would like those to be. Just try to reflect those to the purpose of your exercise. Like life in general, you can't win all the fights, instead try to win the war.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

How easy it is to serve customers well - case Garmin

So often I've been facing poor customer experiences with broken products, that I was again ready for a fight when charger from our Garmin Forerunner 110 sports watch broke down just after two months of usage. I found the local Garmin warranty and maintenance phone number and took the call: 

"Hi, I have Forerunner 110 and clip connecting the charger to the watch broke down. I've had it only for 2 months."

Lady in the phone responded:

"Was it Forerunner 110?"

Me:"Yes"

"What's your address, so we'll send you a new one."

I was so amazed on this service they provided. It just made my day, because it was so easy and I've been a big fan of Garmin products for a longer time. Now I'm a fan of the whole company.

It's so easy to always complain about bad services, so I thought it's time to also credit the ones who really know how to serve the customer well. Thanks Garmin Finland for great service.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

IKEA just gets it

Yesterday I was at Ikea and noticed how cleverly they place their goods. They are really thinking the whole consumer experience and actual needs of the person. That of course helps on their sales, but it’s also really convenient for the customers.

So what they actually do, is when you are in section for frames and paintings, there’s small sets of tools to hang those in the wall, spread all around that section. So when you pick a frame, you actually realize I need to hang it on the wall and I need some tools for it. Ikea jumps in here and offers set of tools to be picked up also. How convenient.

This same approach is taken all around. So where there are beds, there’s small amounts of pillows and blankets next to those. Still there’s their own sections for all of these separately. So if you are only there for pillows and blankets, you can go to that section directly.

That’s just clever.

This was originally posted 17.2.2011 at lostinux.wordpress.com. I've closed that blog of mine and I'm re-posting some of the most popular and best posts from there to here.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Steve Jobs presenting Apple new headquarters plan

No one can argue that Apple is one of the most innovative companies in the world. Much of it personalizes to Steve Jobs. You've most probably seen videos he talking in Apple press conferences and events, but those are carefully planned events that doesn't reveal much about the personality of Mr Jobs. Here's on the other hand footage from Cupertino town hall meeting from yesterday (7.6.2011) where he is presenting their plan and vision for the new headquarters for Apple to Cupertino.

In this video it's refreshing to see him to reveal his thinking about well-being of his employees, his commitments to his home town and the whole thinking behind Apple's desire for calm and beautiful design. I think this thinking perfectly reveals the importance of the soft values, like having enough nature available for employees, in Apple's thinking of making it perfect.

I think I figured out, from this single 20 minute video, much more about Mr. Jobs way of thinking than tens of articles I've read about him. Watch it with careful thinking if you like:



Written by +Henri Hämäläinen