COMMENTS
That Blue Man article was a great read! Thanks much!
Why to provide support for free: Service is a sales channel. We get now get the majority of our business via word of mouth and internally we often cite the free support as a cause of this. The cost of running that service operation is small relative to the mass marketing spend we would otherwise have to do to get attention.
I buy into this.
I did some work with the uniformed services and it involved getting the hang of the way orders are issued. We used the acronym SMEAC. Situation (the map, the enemy, the terrain), Mission (exactly what we intended to accomplish as a group - the hill we were going to take), Execution (a list of our sub-goals, one sentence for each section - you secure the bridge, you guard the king, you guard the perimeter), Administration (resources over and above what we are allocated on a long term basis), Communication (when to check in and how - radio silence, channel, deadlines).
I started to use this in my own practice. I learned something important. When something goes wrong on a project, it INVARIABLY came down to the instructions we had given and failings at the SITUATION level. We had neglected to pass on information about the context. We knew and our juniors didn't. As the work unfolded, they made decisions on the basis of what we had told them, and guess what, we hadn't told them what they needed to know.
It was a revelation. Difficulties at work are 90% if not more down to lack of shared context. Stop to find out what assumptions the other person is making. Stop to think about what you haven't told them!
I like it The WHY manual.
Thanks for your post, Dharmesh. You really highlight some of the best practices of a business: hiring quality employees and doing what's right for each customer.
The "Why To" struck a chord with me because I used to work in government, where I needed to remind myself every now and again why I was there instead of in the private sector making twice as much. When I eventually left that job, I wrote a 30-page "Why To" manual intended to inspire my successor.
We are bringing about to start recruiting our first few team members. And we too want to solve for intelligence, passion, and integrity. Any suggestions for various parts of the recruiting process? We are going on campus at Chalmers, which is the MIT of Sweden (located here in Gothenburg). Thanks.