Dare to disagree and lead!

I actually believe very strongly in this....a talk every entrepreneur shoud watch:


The other day I say a presentation about an inhouse project of a big company that failed big time. Waste of time for the most of it, but they learned a big chunk of lesson out of it.... It was a classic copycat of Google Wave, which was abandoned by Google some years ago. Wave was pretty much built about the assumption that dicussing a topic to death is a good ting to do when organizing a workflow or even for planning leisure activities. Total crowd-democracy.

I got a little updet during the presentation because I could not understand how some guys, who obviously had some skills going on there, could fall into an obvious trap. They were lacking the common sense of understanding the most basic mecanics of leadership and organizational behaviour.

I wont bore you with that, but the bottom line for me is: When starting a project you need to appoint a devils advocate, who asks the right questions beforehand or during the project...Does it make sense to start this? Is there a real problem we are solving here or do we just try to fix our own lack of leadership skills?

Most startups/projects fail by committing one of the following failures when starting a project:

1. Appointing a team to a problem that exceeeeds a headcount of 5
2. Assembling a team that does not involve all involved / partially touched departments
3. Not analyzing the problem well enough...not knowing where the real problem is. The root of the issue that has to be solved. Where is the biz?
4. "Nerd-Pooling" - creating a task force that consists of a homogeneous bunch of kids....that means skills, soft skills, and age/experience. You need a leader wo guides the discussion. Democracy is good for brainstorming, but for getting things done it is nonsense (most of the time)
5. Did somebody else already solve the problem for you and failed (Google in our particular case). Check if a problem was solved by somebody else already. These guys could have avoided wasting time by researching the stuff that is out there. Do your damn market research:

Bottomline: You need a plan and someone who thells the people the truth about that plan. Dont be polite when people are going the wrong way and you know it...! Help them to avoid a mistake. If they go for it anyways, screw it, theyll learn by their own means... Cheers. M