The irony of much of the book is that the answer to how to motivate is simply “Get out of the way.” Throw in some trust and you’ll have folks truly motivated. Of course, it presumes that the folks you’re hiring are capable. But if you’re in any type of company that requires intellectual effort, motivated people are not that hard to find. Keeping them motivated is the trick. And most firms fail by simply failing to realize that so-called “incentives” are anything but.

The book is filled with tidbits, such as:

• “Careful consideration of reward effects reported in 128 experiments lead to the conclusion that tangible rewards tend to have a substantially negative effect on intrinsic motivation … When institutions … focus on the short-term and opt for controlling people’s behaviour they do considerable long-term damage.” (pg. 39)
• “For artists, scientists, inventors, schoolchildren, and the rest of us, intrinsic motivation … is essential for high levels of creativity.” (pg. 46)
  
• “… researchers at Cornell University studied 320 small businesses, half of which granted workers autonomy, the other half relying on top-down direction. The businesses that offered autonomy grew at four times the rate of the control-oriented firms and had one-third the turnover.” (pg. 91)
• “… satisfaction depends not merely on having goals, but on having the right goals …” (pg. 143)
• “Performance reviews … are about as enjoyable as a toothache and as productive as a train wreck.” (pg. 157)
• “Real challenges are far more invigorating than controlled [ed: read artificial, enforced] leisure.” (pg. 169)

The gist of it all is that creative people crave autonomy. They might need “direction” but it should come in terms of mentoring, not fixed, hard goals that don’t truly motivate. Enforced leisure, goals, deadlines, etc. imply that someone higher up in the hierarchy knows better, that they have a better grasp of the intricacies of the work being performed or what will make a given individual happiness. It’s rarely the case.

I recommend anyone starting a company read this book. I also recommend anyone at a large firm who’s trying to figure out why their publicly traded firm seems “stuck” to read it, too. The portion of the book that discusses how companies that are constantly providing guidance doing worse — much worse — than those who provide occasional guidance is eye-opening. And once you read it it makes perfect sense. I know from my own experience, the constant jumping to quarterly requirements simply resulted in a staccato performance as we tried to get into step with some random goals as opposed to striving to be the best, to focus on the customer, to provide joy to employees and clients so that strong relationships are built where those clients will repeatedly come back because they know they’re getting more than just a bum in a seat. They’re getting a creative person who cares about their problem as much as they do.

What I’m going to try to do in the coming months (years?) is create a bit of an inverted diary, one that effectively goes back through time and, with hindsight, examines what happened at my startup from its inception, to the original ideas, through the trials and tribulations of financing, and the roller coaster that is any startup.

Some may consider my tale as being told through rose coloured glasses, or perhaps from a jaded perspective. But I’ll just leave those considerations to the reader. I will simply state what I now feel, now that years have passed. The only advantage I have is that I have notes I penned during that time which I will use to recreate what it was like to do a startup. However it wont’ be a true chronological telling but structured a bit so as to simplify the telling thereby, hopefully, making the tale that much easier and more informative.

And why am I doing this? I hope that describing the journey in one entrepreneur’s life will enlighten those yearning to attempt entrepreneurship by providing lessons learned, what was done right, what should never be attempted again, and how any “next deal” will be structured if I ever do it again.

I will start this journey with the following: Doing a start-up is a joy ride; the question is whether it is a joy ride to heaven or hell. I’ll let the reader decide.

You can see entrepreneurs making the right decisions and still losing. You feel the pain of the various entrepreneurs who were forced out of their companies or saw their life work collapse around them. Even some of those that were financially rewarded suffered as they were wrenched from their companies only to watch as the companies became something other than what they had intended. I found it comforting to realize that the emotional roller coaster for start-ups was pretty much universal.

This is one of those books that I wish were written back in 1997.

To put it into Daniel Pink’s words:

When it comes to motivation, there’s a gap between what science knows and what business does. Our current business operating system–which is built around external, carrot-and-stick motivators–doesn’t work and often does harm. We need an upgrade. And the science shows the way. This new approach has three essential elements: 1. Autonomy – the desire to direct our own lives. 2. Mastery — the urge to get better and better at something that matters. 3. Purpose — the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves.

And that presentation I linked to earlier? Probably the coolest thing I’ve ever seen on YouTube and the coolest presentation I’ve seen in a very long time. Wish I could draw that well and explain concepts that eloquently.

And to show you they’re stupid questions, here are my answers to these interview questions.

1. How many golf balls can fit in a school bus?

Why would you care. You’d have to buy them and then get them in there and then clean up afterwards, which would result in opening the door and having all the stupid balls fall out going all over the freaking place. And I’m not even going to get into short bus, medium sized bus, long bus. Thus, the correct answer is “None” since only an idiot would even contemplate how many golf balls can fit in a school bus.

2. How much should you charge to wash all the windows in Seattle?

To paraphrase Dr. Evil, One Trillion Dollars. Why? Because I don’t do windows and besides, it’s always raining in Seattle so what would be the point of washing the stupid windows.

3. In a country in which people only want boys every family continues to have children until they have a boy. If they have a girl, they have another child. If they have a boy, they stop. What is the proportion of boys to girls in the country?

I guess genetics and anthropological evidence would have to have been completely ignored by the person who came up with this gem. So I peg that person as a super geeky computer type with no comprehension beyond that of using numbers or programming. Thus, they probably want some complex mathematical approximation when it’ll remain 50/50 courtesy of nothing more complex than, oh, the probabilities associated with coin flips.

4. How many piano tuners are there in the entire world?

Some number greater than zero. How many more? Who cares, other than the moron interviewer. Knowing or even determining this fact is a waste of resources and time better spent on anything else, including wondering how many angels dance on the head of a pin.

5. Why are manhole covers round?

Ah. The manhole question. Easiest answer is because Microsoft needed a stupid question to ask during their interviews to make them sound smart.

6. Design an evacuation plan for San Francisco.

Go East. If you get wet you’re going the wrong way, turn around and go East. You’d think the fine folks at Google would realize where San Francisco is located. Sheesh.

7. How many times a day does a clock’s hands overlap?

No idea and don’t care. Besides, my clock is digital so the question is so last century.

8. Explain the significance of “dead beef”.

A hexadecimal question. How quaint. Next up, we’ll ask questions about those weird little 1s and 0s and what they mean.

9. A man pushed his car to a hotel and lost his fortune. What happened?

Someone with too much time on his hands and nothing productive to do with it wrote a stupid riddle.

10. You need to check that your friend, Bob, has your correct number but you cannot ask him directly. You must write the question on a card which and give it to Eve who will take the card to Bob and return the answer to you. What must you write on the card, besides the question, to ensure Bob can encode the message so that Eve cannot read your phone number?

I’ve been through this before. I don’t use Bob. Never have. Besides, Microsoft doesn’t even sell it anymore so I don’t really care if my “friend” Bob has my correct number or not as he’s stuck in whatever binary hell Clippy and him share.

11. You’re the captain of a pirate ship and your crew gets to vote on how the gold is divided up. If fewer than half of the pirates agree with you, you die. How do you recommend apportioning the gold in such a way that you get a good share of the booty, but still survive?

Soooo, I’m a crappy captain that lets my crew vote on how the gold is divvied up, eh? Sure I’m the captain of a pirate ship. Sure I’m a pirate. Sure that all adds up. Be gone demon of stupidity before I put my sabre through you.

12. You have eight balls all of the same size 7 of them weigh the same, and one of them weighs slightly more. How can you find the ball that is heavier by using a balance and only two weighings?

If I had 8 balls I’d be off to the urologist. Especially if one suddenly was larger or heavier than the others.

13. You are given 2 eggs. You have access to a 100-story building. Eggs can be very hard or very fragile means it may break if dropped from the first floor or may not even break if dropped from 100th floor. Both eggs are identical. You need to figure out the highest floor of a 100-story building an egg can be dropped without breaking. The question is how many drops you need to make. You are allowed to break 2 eggs in the process.

Where did you get these wondrous eggs from? And how, pray tell, will the little birdie escape the uber strong egg? This is a question to make you feel stupid? I just feel sorry for the idiot who had to recite this as a question.

14. Explain a database in three sentences to your eight-year-old nephew.

Ooo. Ooo. I’ll answer this one right. “It’s like a toilet where shit goes in and you can later get the shit back out.” There. See, one sentence. I’m therefore 3 times more efficient than the interviewer could ever hope to imagine! What do I win?

15. You are shrunk to the height of a nickel and your mass is proportionally reduced so as to maintain your original density. You are then thrown into an empty glass blender. The blades will start moving in 60 seconds. What do you do?

I don’t answer physically retarded questions, especially ones that are scientifically implausible. Or is this the story line for another bad Hollywood movie where they mangle all of science?

• I find your lack of faith disturbing.
• No one will stop us now.
• I am altering our deal. Pray I don’t alter it any further.
• The Emperor is not as forgiving as I am.
• Don’t fail me again.
• Perhaps I can find new ways to motivate them.
• I’m here to put them back on schedule.
• No. Leave them to me. I will deal with them myself.

I don’t know. Those all just sound kind of, uh, familiar…

One thing I noticed courtesy of John Cook’s blog is what amounts to two new additions to Brooks’ Law.

Brooks’ Law is the famous “Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.” We can now add:

• “Many hands make light work” — Often.
• Corollary: “Many hands make more work” — Always.

And what I’d call Brooks’ Law of Design:

• Most great works have been made by one mind. The exceptions have been made by two minds.

Obviously, I highly recommend anything written by Fred Brooks. His Mythical Man Month is a classic that everyone should read, especially project managers. His new book is the same, a must read.

I’ve always loved the fact that Brooks has little use for the Waterfall Model. I loathe it, and it seems he does too. I like being in good company .

Now, the one that truly surprised me was Marc Andreeson’s blog. It was great. And then it stopped. He’s explained the stoppage. He started a fund. Good for him! He’s down to earth and a nerd so he gets it. It’ll be good for the startups of Silicon Valley. But I miss his posts. And he seems to have cleansed his blog. I have no idea if this is so he can start fresh or that’s he’s abandoned the blog. I’m hoping he’s just resetting. His blog was always full of nuggets.

Which reminds me, I watched  this interview with Andreeson. Excellent. My favourite part is where he humbly admits the role of luck in the success of any startup, and that it’s highly underrated as an actual influence on success. He gets what part luck plays, as opposed to many who think that a good idea will trump all. And, sure, you can claim to “make your own luck” but in the end it’s much more complicated than that. You need to have a decent product, a good, technically sound, management team, good technical team, and a hungry sales team. You need to have investors with the horizon to wait for the technology to properly be digested — especially today when the ideas being pushed aren’t as obvious to buyers as was true years ago. Plus, you need to have timing and luck on your side. You need to be able to scratch that itch and match up with clients in such a way as to provide them with what they need so they’ll provide you with what you need — namely, paying customers.

That’s why I hope Andreeson continues his blog, It had so many good points for entrepreneurs and that’s something that’s seriously lacking. And today, with entrepreneurs not being as clustered within one geographic area due to the power of the internet we need to have broader access to the insights of folks like Andreeson who knows it’s not just the money you know, but the fortune that may befall the company that gets that cash.

So, here’s to hoping Andreeson, at least, starts posting again.

Although I hope to write a bit of a review once I’m through the book, this post, however, concerns a quote from his book that just struck me on a number of levels.

Strategy makes sense as a project only in the context of uncertainty, or, more generally, in a context where pure reason will not deliver a definitive answer to the question “what is to be done?” But a purely rational framework … leaves no space for such “irrationality.” So the framework solves strategic problems only in a context where there is no possibility that such problems will arise.

A stunning statement. And it reminds me oh so much of Project Management, especially as applied to software projects — which, to be honest, are highly irrational. However, we try to push some form of framework atop a project only to watch projects flounder the more tightly we adhere to a given framework or project management strategy.

Stewart’s book reminds me of deMarco’s recent paper in the IEEE on Project Management and this choice quote:

My early metrics book, Controlling Software Projects: Management, Measurement, and Estimates [1986], played a role in the way many budding software engineers quantified work and planned their projects. In my reflective mood, I’m wondering, was its advice correct at the time, is it still relevant, and do I still believe that metrics are a must for any successful software development effort? My answers are no, no, and no.

I’m gradually coming to the conclusion that software engineering is an idea whose time has come and gone.

Software development is and always will be somewhat experimental. The actual software construction isn’t necessarily experimental, but its conception is. And this is where our focus ought to be. It’s where our focus always ought to have been.

As Knuth has repeatedly stated, software development is an art. It’s a craft. It’s not a science. And I, as many of my friends know, have long stated that anything that has to put “science” in its name isn’t a science. And the sooner we realize and behave according to the reality that computer science is more artistic but with a rigorous requirement pertaining to mathematics and that might be why it attracts the eccentric individuals that I spend my days with. And I wouldn’t have it any other way!

Today I came across this article over at Ad Age. It got me thinking. Is too much money a problem? The article argues that too much too soon is bad. I will state that I agree. In fact, I think one of the best things to come out of the whole startup scene is Y Combinator which provides a modicum of funding to get a company quickly off the ground. Some folks I know tend to think it’s not a viable model, but I disagree. I think it’s actually a great model for recent graduates who are already frugally minded and able to work quickly and intensely. I don’t think it’s that good a model for those who have come to appreciate some finer things in life, like a social life .

And why do I think Y Combinator is a good thing? It allows for the “fail early/fail often” mentality that is crucial to getting a product out there and in customers hands and finding out if customers are actually interested in paying money for said product. Furthermore, by only providing a bit of cash it means working lean and focusing on getting the product out the door.

I’m hoping more investors start taking this route. I think there’s a lot of potential out there that doesn’t need a lot of cash to get off the ground, but needs some plus some mentoring. It feels like the 80s all over again when you could start up a company with $5000 a few months time, a friend or two, and a lot of determination. I hope I’m right, because it means we’ll be seeing a lot of cool companies and technologies be developed soon and that’s a good thing.