ThoughtWorks

How to promote yourself

A while ago Alec Brownstein was looking for a job in the advertising industry. He bought a bunch of adwords to appear next to the names of executives in companies he wanted to work for, and waited for them to google their names. Cool thinking that got him a job.

something similar happened with ThoughtWorks this week. On the ThoughtWorks facebook page a little ad appeared, “Dear ThoughtWorks, My name is Scott and I want to work with you”.

Dear ThoughtWorks, my name is scott and I want to work with you

Clicking on the link opened a microsite dedicated to why ThoughtWorks should employ Scott Robinson.  ThoughtWorkers soon picked up on this and twitter came alive with #dearscott and then this and this.  He’ll still go through the intense recruitment process, but another great example for using Social Media to promote yourself and get a job.

Magic moment at the Waldorf hotel

ThoughtWorks had its party on Friday night at the Waldorf Hotel in London.  Seventy or so years ago when my grandparents were married they stayed there on their first night.  Fifty years later my Grandfather was going through some old paperwork and dug out the original receipt from their stay.  To celebrate their fiftieth wedding anniversary he wrote to the Waldorf, booking a room and enclosed a copy of the recept for their interest and ammusement.  He thought nothing more of it until they arrived.  They were given the same room that stayed in 50 years before.  The following day when they checked out and my Gradfather was settling the bill, something was wrong.  ‘This can’t be right’ he said, ‘surely you’ve left a nought off’.  But it was right.  The Waldorf were charging him the same price that he paid fifty years previously.  That was a real magic moment.

Innovation through the recession

Two men were running through the jungle chased by a lion.  One of them stopped, took off his backpack and took his trainers out.  The other man turned around. “Why are you putting your trainers on?” he asked, “They won’t make you run faster than the lion”. To which the man replied “I don’t need to run faster than the lion…”

In the current market conditions just blindly running won’t get you ahead of your competitors.  And standing still is not a sustainable option.  Those that succeed won’t be the ones that batten down the hatches and retreat to the trenches, history shows it will be those that continue to innovate and cultivate ideas.  During the 1990-91 recession, according to a Bain & Company study, twice as many companies leaped from the bottom of their industries to the top as did so in the years before and after.

“Even though we’re in an economic downturn, we’re in an innovation upturn” said Bill Gates at the time.

In the 1920’s Post and Kellogg’s went into the recession head to head. Post cut back, it reined in expenses and slashed advertising budget.  Kelloggs meanwhile maintained their marketing spend and pushed their newly launched product, Rice Krispies.  Today Kellogg’s are a household name.  Where are Post?

IT organisations are retreating to core, keeping the lights on and holding off any “non-essential’ projects, innovation included.  This is a shortsighted viewpoint, but not entirely unexpected.  With project life cycles taking so long, innovation traditionally takes significant investment and time to see results.  Modern lean and agile approaches to IT are a challenge to this entrenched view.  It is possible to innovate at speed.  It is possible to take an idea and turn it into something tangible in weeks rather than years.  Let’s start with the idea.  Where does it come from?  You could get the brightest minds from expensive management consultancy firms, but they take time. And in uncertain times, what do they really know? (I speak with experience having once been a customer strategy management consultant).  Alternatively you could harvest ideas from your customers.  That’s what IdeaStorm does for Dell.  And Mix does for Oracle (built by ThoughtWorks by the way). Don’t restrict this to your customers, building an internal ideas engine in the enterprise yields great results.

So once you’ve got the idea, how do you nurture it from a vision into a proposition that has legs?

Product innovation is all very well, but do you have the capability and the attitude to really do it?  In the current ecomomic climate, unless product innovation is in your DNA, chances are it will need to be accompanied by process innovation.  Why? Because most organisational processes are slow, cumbersome and hinder the agility required to really innovate.

In 2009, if there’s one thing that organizations need, it’s agility. Our economy and the business environment are a steady stream of ups, downs and rapid change; in such an environment, the ability to sense, respond and react are true survival skills!

At ThoughtWorks we do both these things for our clients all the time, helping them introduce aligity into the whole product development lifecycle; product innovation through process innovation.  It starts with helping them rapidly distill their vision into something concrete, then prirotising and estimating what is important before building it at speed with quality to get innovation to market; fail fast or succeed sooner.

Recession doesn’t make the market need disappear. Andrew Rezeghi in this great paper (which is abound with stories of companies who have innovated through recession) argues you should invest in your customers, now they need you most, loyalty hangs in the balance.  Whilst the market may be driving down prices, now is the time to focus on experience based differentiation.  How can you use digital channels to engage with your customers in new and compelling ways?  How can you harness social media and new interaction paradigms to delight and engage your customers?  Ho can you innovate at speed? Go beyond your product and grow roots for lifetime value when the good times return.

Personal branding is more than stoking your ego

It is easy to knock social media and building a prescence and profile on the web as little more than stoking the ego.  “I’ve got more Twitter followers than you”, “I’ve got more facebook friends, more subscribers to my blog, more linkedin contacts…”  But there is more to it than that.  The way you use social media should be about building you as a brand.

Take a look at David Armano’s excellent presentation on Brand U.0.  Celebrities have brand, and with that comes influence.  Similalry people like you or me who develop their brand start to have influence.  And that influence gets you places.  At ThoughtWorks we are recruiting for a new Information Architect role.  Rather than describing the role in terms of skills and competencies, the starting point has been ‘we need a person “like that”‘, pointing to to both particular people within ThoughtWorks, and also on the broader web, looking at LinkedIn profiles, blogs etc.  If you have a brand you have already made yourself stand out.  In these challenging times your profile is not about your ego, it is about your future.

The best CIOs don’t care about IT

One of the (many) things about ThoughtWorks developers is that, whilst they are passionate about technology, (and will happily argue for hours amongst themselves about the relative merits of REST over SOAP or ruby on rails over django), more often than not when they start a conversation with a client, technology will be at the back of their mind. I think it is safe to say that generally the primary driver in the ThoughtWorks mind is business value:

  • Why are we building this application?
  • What are the business objectives?
  • What will deliver the greatest value in the shortest timeframe?

Once the requirements of the business are understood, and framed in terms of their business value, then (and only then) should we turn to the technology. This can often be a challenging message; IT professionals like to think in terms of architecture and platforms, yet often these constrain the ability to truly deliver what the busines really needs.

The development team may be a Java shop and only does Java, yet the end users live in a world of Microsoft. So what happens – IT develop user interfaces that expose data in a web browser only for the business users to copy and paste it into the tools of their trade – Microsoft Office. And because IT only do Java that’s the way it has to be.

Value is lost in this thinking. It is easy to argue on the cost to expand the team requiring new skills by introducing .net into the architecture. But what is the cost to the business of time spent through inefficient work practices? All to often IT is an end unto itself, rather than the means. IT needs to remember it only exists to enable organisations. The most refreshing CIOs are those that recognise this. Those who focus upon delivering business value and question every big decision – what value is this giving to the whole organisation rather than thinking in terms of their IT silo. In fact, the sort of way that ThoughtWorkers think.