Jørgen Emerslund

Jeg satt på flyet nedover fra Trondheim til Oslo i går, Norwegian-flyet får jeg anmerke. Det slo meg at SAS har – i hvertfall i Norge – et kjempestort PR-problem i forhold til nettopp Norwegian.

Norwegian har Bjørn Kjos. Ikke en gretten gammel gubbe, men en glad gammel gubbe som ler rart og smiler på stort sett alle bilder. Vi har lyst til å ta en pils med Bjørn, og prate om da han var jagerpilot eller når han fikk møterett for høyesterett.

SAS derimot, kommer ferdig installert med gretne gamle gubber. Det hjelper ikke at SAS er bedre i å rydde opp etter askekaoset, når det er velkjent at SAS sliter med å tjene penger, mens Norwegian går som en kule.

Som om ikke det er nok er det SAS som er selskapet som tar pengene våre. Vi glemmer lett at SAS var de uten gebyrer, og at Norwegian tar 50-lappen hver vei vi vil ha med en koffert. At Norwegian startet opp med å love “ingen skjulte gebyrer”, og nå nærmer seg Ryanair. For vi har lyst til å ta en kaffe med Bjørn Kjos.

Det er bare å gjøre noen enkle søk på Google News for å finne nyheter som (svært subjektivt sett) er relativt jevnt fordelt i positiv favør av begge selskapene. Likevel er det Norwegian som er sjarmøren, mens SAS er den trauste, litt trege, giganten. Norwegian har Bjørn, SAS har en mann med slips fra Sverige som vi bare ser når det er snakk om kvartalsresultater. Det er derfor vi liker Norwegian, de har en kar vi har lyst til å ta en brus sammen med.

Garr Raynold, fra den utmerkede nettsiden Presentation Zen, delte for et par år siden sine tanker på inspirasjon – og om det egentlig betyr noe. Det har bruker som utgangseksempel er den etter hvert velkjente taleevner, og hvordan logikken var at han prater så høytflyvende at det ikke var å forvente at han hadde noen reelle planer og konkret politikk. Særlig oss ingeniører og andre akademikere* er tilhengere av rasjonelle data – og har en tendens til å avvise tanken på at noe annet enn innhold betyr noe. » Read the rest of this entry «

“Tech Guy vs. Biz Guy” var tittelen på en bloggpost jeg kom over for et par internettliv siden (aka. 2008), og har lenge ment å kommentere på i form av en bloggpost. Sånn i teorien er jeg en fin kryssning av de to. Jeg har gått industriell økonomi, som betyr at jeg har en fin blanding av økonomiske fag og datafag. Jeg har gått entreprenørskole og gründerskole, og jeg har jobbet de to siste årene som systemutvikler. Kort sagt, en fin blanding.

Det er, i hvertfall som jeg opplever det, allment akseptert at man trenger begge parter for å bygge opp en suksessfull organisasjon. Tech guy kan være ingeniøren, men det kan også være idealisten som skriver leseinnleggene for den frivillige organisasjonen, eller i min setting i Hjelpekorpset, det kan være han som hopper først uti buskene på søksaksjonen. Biz guy er han som sitter i møter for å finne ut av organisasjonsproblemer, eller for å få budsjettet til å gå opp på en god måte, eller kort og godt for å få til bedriftens første skikkelige salg.

Det blir fort til at man jobber litt i hver sin boks, selv om man er i samme bedrift og organisasjon, uten å se den gjensidige avhengigheten. Uten Tech guy /gal/ så har man ikke så mye å diskutere på møterommet, men samtidig; uten biz guy har man sannsynligvis ikke så mye ressurser eller muligheter til å holde aktiviteten gående.

For dataingeniører så kan man snu seg til utvikling for open source, og andre grener har selvfølgelig sine alternativer, men hvis man skal få til en god organisasjon, så trenger man begge endene.

Synergi, sjø!

I wrote a quick note some days ago, on general principles I try to help me guide through the redicolous mix of activities I enjoy calling my life.

Kick ass whatever I do – simple, and oh so difficult to stick to. But the fact is, most of us don’t even give our best efforts most of the time, and if you don’t know what I talking about – think again. Slacking off a little bit here and a little bit there is the common standard. Sad to say, I do it too. Will try to keep it at a minimum, though.

Work out regularly. I have a program for the next weeks, that I’ll try to stick to – basic cardio 3 times a week, and increasing efforts throughout, ending in Oslo Marathon September 27. I don’t have any hope of getting a good time – a finish will be a victory in my book. After that, I’ll try to mix in some strength. The idea, cut some fat before starting to build. For nutrition – just trying to stay fairly healthy.

Be an awsome person to relate to. I would describe myself as an extrovert introvert. I enjoy other people’s company, but the fact that I am writing up this post @ almost 2:00 AM says a lot. But I don’t want to fight that. I want to fight my urge not be as good with people as I want to be – be it colleagues both at work and in Red Cross, clients, friends, and random strangers – not to mention with my awsome girlfriend. I want to be even more trustworthy and easy to have relationships with – no matter what kind of relationship it is. There – I said it, now it’s just about following through.

Stop procastination and manage how I spend my time. I have a huge procatination problem at times. I keep a pretty up-to-date todolist and calendar. But I am not good enough at executing the things at it right away.

Control my finances – Money, good or evil, controls a lot of what we can do and not. It’s not enough to manage time-spending, of course, the money is as big of a part of the equation as time. (“If you got the money, I got the time…”). I don’t do too bad with this, but a reminder is always in order, as I – as the most of us – don’t have the luxery to be able to let this thing rest.

The last item on the list is, in my book, the all-reaching and most important one – one point to rule them all, you might say.

Knowing my goals, and making sure that each day I am working towards them. I don’t have any plans of going through life just doing whatever comes up. Keeping tabs of what I am spending my time on, vs what I ulitmately think of as my values in life is necessary. Of course, not all the time, but from time to time, it’s a good thing making sure that things don’t get missed for less important opportunities.

This is as much a mental note, as a real blog post – I’ll need to write up something more thourough during the weekend to get the flow going. As many, I live what I like to think of as a good life, but with tons of potential for improving as well. Plan of attack:

• Kick ass whatever I do – being at my daytime job, volunteering at the Red Cross, running my company, working out or being with my girlfriend or friends.
• Work out regularly, and watch what I’m eating and drinking. I’m addicted to Coca Cola, and have been looking to kick that habit for years.
• Be an awsome person to relate to. Be honest, proactive and say what’s on my mind.
• Stop procastination and manage my time properly.
• Control my finances – stop spending money I don’t need to spend, and knowing when and how much I can afford to splurge.
• Knowing my goals, and making sure that each day I am working towards them.

There are tons of lists telling you all your alternatives for everything you need to be doing in your business. I’m a developer, so the focus will be on that alternative, but if you’re a designer you should still be able to adopt the ideas here. So let’s cut to the chase and look at what tools you might need:

1. Development environment: Being a “Web Entrepreneur”™ in my book implies that you’re either a designer or developer, targeting the web. No matter what, you need either Adobe Creative Suite or some development environment. I’m using Eclipse with various plug-ins. If possible, both is probably the best – being able to cross over between the two worlds is priceless (to you – for your customer it’s your decision ).
2. Communications: You cannot (as you probably know) do business without proper communications. Get your own domain name, and have a e-mail account. Set it up in Thunderbird, with your choise of plug-ins. Get a business phone – a prepaid cell, if needed. That way – you can leave your work at work.
3. Issue tracker or project manager: No matter what kind of work you’re doing, you are going to need some tool to keep track. My weapon of choise: FogBugz. There are many others, though, and it often boils down to personal preferences.
4. A good workspace: Don’t underestimate the efficiency improvements of having a good place to work. If you enjoy visiting coffe shops – cool, bring your laptop with you. But you still want to have a good HQ, where you can sit for hours and forget all about the time.
5. Source code control: Designers, sorry – you probably have some similar tools. But developers know what I’m talking about. You need a place to commit your code when you’re doing changes. It’s called backup. Even if you’re  a one-man-shop, this is still good to keep track of changes, and to be able to go back when something goes wrong. Apple’s Time Machine is a Mac Source control, if you’d like. My suggestion: This is your backup database – of course not placed at your home server. Personal preference: SVN, but there are plenty of others.
6. Budget and Accounting: Yeah, it’s not all that fun, but you’re going to need a simple budget. Set up what you expect to make in revenue, and how you expect to spend that money. If you’re planning to spend more than you need, make sure you know how you are going to cover that loss. During the year, make sure to keep track of how you are doing compared to your target .
7. A friends list: Keep a list of friends of your business. Send them regular e-mails, but make sure you ask for their permission before sending anything to them. This doesn’t have to be just possible customers. Get all kinds of people on your list. Vendors, parents, siblings, family, friends, some competitors maybe – all of which could be send your email or web address to potential customers.
8. Marketing: That is, marketing in the broadest sense. You might end up just using your friends list. You might order up some business cards, and try to hand them out at conferences. A website must be somewhat mandatory for webpreneurs. But, you need to tell people about your business to make money. It might sound obvious, but at least for programmers we enjoy sitting in a dark basement with Dr. Pepper or Coca Cola besides the screen and code until we fall asleep on the keyboard. Hint: No good.
9. Routines: I don’t really care what you say. You’re going to have bugs, customers, emails to answer, phone calls to return, prospect to follow up on and more, and you need to have some sort of structure to take care of this. It doesn’t really matter what kind of system you have – as long as you get things done in a timely fashion. The simplest way is to keep a running list, and go through it once a day. It means you get the advantages of batch processing, and you don’t have to keep people waiting.

As this is a new run at Northern Webpreneur, I’m going back to scratch and using some bits and pieces from old posts, that I no longer have available. I had a series about 8 months ago, that together formed what I viewed as a Manifesto for my company, E.Data Studios. This post is a merge of all those six posts, with new thoughts within the whole thing. Warning: This is going to be very high-level stuff – no code to go along with it – sorry! I believe any knowledge based company needs a bit of this high-level vision stuff. I doesn’t have too be too long or complex. If not, anything that’s remotely relevant will become interesting, and when you get “The Boss”™ on board, you’re doing it. I’m not saying a company shouldn’t be open to explore opportunities, but it’s a fine line before you not paying enough attention to what the company should be doing.

Find a big problem

A great team (I’ll get to that part) only gets done as much change in the world as they aspire to. ” Shoot for the moon…” and such. I’m a big fan of Joel Spolsky and his Fog Creek Software, but I can’t help thinking – what would that company be doing if they took the same attitude, work ethics, methodology and the same brilliant minds, and tackled a problem that is orders of magnitude bigger than issue tracking / software project management. I think the first piece of the problem is to find a big problem to work on. Then a bigger on. Then, step up to an even bigger one, and you might be there. The human mind is very impressive once it start working on problems, and you have no right limiting yours to the small potato stuff. At least I don’t think I have that right (you might – that’s your decision), so I’m trying to find a big problem to solve.

Forget about good – be the best

I came across “An incomplete manifesto for growth” on the (in)famous blog Signal vs. Noise yesterday. Skimming through it there are some really good advice there – and some which is utter BS. The heading is borrowed from item nr. 2 on this list: “Forget about good”. I’m sorry – you get to redefine how good is measured to  a certain degree, but you don’t get to ignore the fact that both me, you and everybody else have human needs to compare themselves to others, and the business they work in to others. But, in the literal sense of it, you should forget about being (pretty) good. You should aim to be the best and have / work in the best company in the history of man. The workday of a manager should be how she can improve the company even more. How she can make sure that it’s easier to get the very best people hired, and get them to stay on board for a long time. How these people can become even better at their jobs and how all small systems within the company can be running smoothly. And the same goes for everybody in the company: How to let this company be it’s best – and perform at its best.

Create a team

I am a big believer in small teams that can do great things. The best of the best can do so much more individually than a crew of mediocre people doing the same job. You have all seen them – some people just seem so much better at a job than everybody that’s around them. And they thrive on having people as good as themselves around. So, put as few of these as possible together, and sparks will fly. There will be disagreements, quite possibly some strong ones, but good results will come from these. And as long as everybody can manage to have a laugh together afterwards, you’re fine.

Small teams doesn’t waste unneccessary resources communcating or coordinating. Less meetings, less looking at each others for guidance, less of pretty much anything bad.

A great place to work

This is a bit more of “be the best” zen from above. And, heads-up, I said I’m a fan of Joel Spolsky, and much of this is inspired by what he writes. The office of a great company should make everyone want to run, not walk to work. (Cars is out of the question in this carbon-neutreal era ). Everybody equiped with the best equipment that they can get a hold of for their tasks. And of course, more difficult to measure: A great work environment.

KISS

Well, beyond that kissing the right person maks you feel good – this is a well-know acronym for “Keep It Simple, Stupid!”. Albert Einstein said it like this: “Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler”. That goes for the whole schebang that you’re doing. The source code, the business processes and logic, and even decisions. If you design a software design that’s easy to follow, people working on it will be more productive. If you clean out bad code, aka refactor, it will be easier to work more on that code. Don’t get me started on in-code comments – do both: make your code self explanitory, and then comment it in a way that let people read code and/or comment as they please. I digress. Create the minimum amount of administrative work possible, no matter how easy it is, it will take time away from more fun stuff.

Learn

Get books – the paper kind, and make sure everybody has a reading list. Then take some time to explore or discuss what you have read. Try out new techniques in the real world of test servers. Read about things, talk about things, and try them out. Preferrably in a good mix of new and old – something you know quite well, and something you don’t really know at all. That way, everybody improves.

Have fun – love what you’re doing

The final item on my list. No matter how facy office you got, no matter how interesting a problem you are working on, and no matter what it pays, there is no substitue for a labor of love. That includes having fun with your co-workers by the way. It means laugh out loud at something strange you see in a YouTube video, and it means getting excited about small stuff. That’s how the hours at work doesn’t feel like hours, but like minutes, and you forget to go home for dinner until someone calls and asks why you’re late.

These are what I belive to be determening criterias  for creating business sucess. You won’t succeed on these alone, but you’ll be well on your way.