Nearly four years ago to this day, I put up a post on basement.org entitled U.S. Tech Workers: Wake Up. It’s essentially a call to arms for technology professionals in the U.S. and other “advanced” (*cough*) societies:
There are some very bright and very hungry people out there that would love to replace the stereotypically stagnant American technology group. The outsourcing of routine and mundane tasks should be embraced by American tech workers. It should be perceived as a “freeing up” for Americans to do what we’re known for: innovate. Instead, there’s a groundswell of anger towards companies that outsource. This anger comes from an unhealthy place in my opinion. Tech workers in the U.S. need to be less concerned about outsourcing and more concerned with reinventing themselves as indispensable players in technology.
Fast forward four years. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, talking about the crisis hitting U.S. auto makers:
How could these companies be so bad for so long? Clearly the combination of a very un-innovative business culture, visionless management and overly generous labor contracts explains a lot of it.
For the U.S. and Europe, the message is pretty clear: the party is over (or at the very least, winding down). In a hyper-connected global marketplace, we’re going to need to step up our game and reset our expectations of what it seriously means to compete. The changing labor landscape has been well documented (Friedman himself has written a couple of bookson the subject) but I think today, in these trying economic times, another argument materializes: how do you keep a technology group embedded inside an organization competitive and motivated to innovate? After all, they’re not really “competing” for business. They already have jobs and titles and nice offices with big LCD monitors. Other than the occasional bonus or promotion, what else is there to motivate a group of technologists inside of a company?
Here’s one approach: fire them all and re-hire them as consultants. In other words, “outsource” your efforts. This sounds a bit harsh, but how else can we instill just the right dose of paranoia so that people work harder, think smarter and take more risks? We can’t rightly ask a product manager to threaten to fire the entire development team if they don’t deliver X, Y and Z by a certain date. Hell, imagine threatening your team every few weeks.
Arc90 is effectively an outsourced design and development shop. Our clients threaten to fire us every day. In fact, some of our clients tell us they’re firing us as soon as we finish a project. How does this shape our mindset? We aim to please. We want our clients to be happy all the time. We want them to constantly see the value of what we deliver and we want to always exceed expectations. If that happens, they won’t fire us (i.e. not re-sign us for other projects) and if we’re lucky, they may throw us more work.
Our first product, Kindling takes this to an even more drastic micro-level. Kindling is based on a monthly-subscription model with no obligations to stick around. Customers are welcome to fire us any time without even a conversation. Within such a dynamic, we can’t help but shape our thinking around constantly improving and getting better. Our existence depends on it.
How will you get that embedded technology group in your organization to think the same way? To adopt the same level of healthy paranoia that fuels new thinking and innovation? It’s a tricky proposition, but an important one I believe. It’s this mindset that will elevate us yet again as a leader and innovator.
We are an insanely successful society. We’ve been feeding off the riches of innovation for years and are just now realizing that the scavengers are at the door and they want a slice of it much more badly than we do. General Motors isn’t on life support because of the current economic downturn, it’s on life support because Japan ate us for lunch. We simply lost our will to compete and innovate. I’ll close with a quote from Andy Grove, Intel’s legendary former CEO:
Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.