What does a boss expect?

Yesterday I wrote about what I think it takes to be a boss. Today, I'm going to write about what your boss wants from you.

As I said yesterday, everyone has a boss. Your boss has a boss. His boss has a boss. And so on. There is an unending circle of trust and dependence that encompasses all of us (i.e., we all have a boss).

So, what does your boss want?

1. Solutions

I'm sure you've heard this before, but your boss wants solutions, not just problems. Sure it's your boss' job to help provide solutions, but it's your job too. Why to you think you were hired? How do you like it when someone comes to you with a problem, but no suggestions on how to solve it. Now think about how that would feel if it happened constantly, every day. It IS important that you let your boss know about problems. The flow of information is key, but it's also important that you bring a solution. If your boss is the only one doing the thinking, then what value are you adding to the mix? When you bring a problem, bring a solution with you. It may not be the right one, but it's better than coming in empty handed.

2. Multiple viewpoints

When you talk to your boss, it is important to bring your perspective to the situation. Your boss probably depends somewhat on your eyes and ears. Your insights are important. But you also need to make sure that you can see your boss' perspective on things. If you can't see each situation from both the trenches and from a leadership point of view, you aren't adding any value. Make sure you at least try to see things from your boss' perspective. This will help both of you.

3. Brevity

There is a reason why a document abstract is also called an "executve summary". It's because your boss often needs to get a quick overview of a situation. If your boss needs more information, he or she will ask you questions or read further. It's very important to be able to present a quick overview of the "lay of the land" at first. For your boss, context is often more important than detail.

4. Directness

This may be just another form of brevity, but I'm adding it in to my list anyway. A boss usually wants you to be direct. Worry more about communication than sparing anyone's feelings. Bosses have usually developed a pretty thick skin. If they haven't, they will. If you have a comment. Present it. Don't hold back. If you have a question. Ask. Don't apologize for asking. If you need something to do your job. Make the request. Don't over justify. Every good boss will solicit questions, comments, and requests. Don't be afraid to speak up. Communication is a two way street.

I'm not saying that by following all of these guidelines that you and your boss will always see eye to eye. You probably won't. But remembering these tips can sure help.

What else would you add to this list?

Let me know.

photo credit, shrubby

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How to be a boss.

A lot of people describe going into business for themselves as "being their own boss". But is this really true? Are you ever really your own boss?

Generally, everyone has someone else who has some sort of expectations of them. As an employee, you have a supervisor or manager of someone who expects something from you. Middle managers report to executives. Executives report to the board. The board members often represent investors who they must answer to. Even at home, your family has certain expectations of you as do your neighbors, your friends, etc. It's a never ending circle of responsibility and trust.

So, what is it that defines a boss? And what do people expect from you as the leader of a company?

There are a lot of components to this, but I think a lot of it boils down to being a trailblazer versus being a trail follower. If you are going to start your own business, you have to be ready to make your own path that others will follow.

Trailblazing isn't always creating something completely new. One analogy might be an artist who learned the basics and then tried something new and started a movement. The artist understood all of the basics of the systems and techniques that other artists use and then decided what to change and when to break free of the known path and become a trailblazer. (Think Picasso, Kandinksy, Matisse, Monet, Pollock, Van Gogh, etc.)

How do you become a trailblazer for your business? Learn the systems, rules and techniques that govern your business. See if you can figure out what parts of those systems are useful and what parts need to be changed to create a new path that gets you to where you want to go. Then lead your company through that rough, bumpy ground and make a new trail that others will want to follow.

The great companies and the heroes in popular literature are filled with these type of trailblazers: Jobs and Wozniak, Brin and Page, Gates, Luke Skywalker, Neo. (Yeah, I just put Neo and Gates in the same sentence...cheesy, but you get the point, right?) These are people or characters who understand the systems they exist within and have figured out a way to change, tweak, interrupt or interfere with those systems to create something new.

If you are the boss, you are the one who needs to create the trail that others will follow. And there will be many times when you are left with no choice but to create your own trail. You will be faced with decisions where there are no good choices. You will find yourself put into situations where none of the standard answers you've learned are feasible. You will have to do more with less. And you will be the one that needs to help others understand why the path you chose is one they should be on too.

What trails will you blaze? How will you change systems to create something new?

photo credit, jayriot

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Success feeds on itself.

Last week my daughter got a new game for her Nintendo DS. It was a dreary day outside and so she spent nearly the whole day playing the game. By the end of the day, she had "beaten" the game. The next day, she "beat" the game about 3 more times. Each time she beat it faster than the last time and did a little better. Each success excited her a little more and fed her desire to try again and do a little better still.

This is a great illustration of how success can feed on itself in business too. Each time you close a deal, do a product release, hire a new employee or create a new partnership, you learn a little bit and hopefully you use that knowledge to do a little better and go a little faster the next time.

Visible successes can also be a great motivator for your company. If you've got the right people on your team, they have as much a desire to be part of an organization that succeeds and shows visible results as you do. As employees see the company starting to win and making progress, it helps to create a little more motivation and a little more enthusiasm. Once your employees see that what they are doing generates successes, they will continue to do it.

Of course, you've got to make sure that you are doing the right things to "win" whatever game it is that your company is playing. And you have to think about how you can "win" a little faster or do a little better each time.

Bertrand Russel said, "Most men would rather die, than think. Many do." You can't let your failures drive you into thoughtlessly reacting to try to create a success. If you find that there is something that you aren't doing well, maybe you shouldn't be doing it. Setting up a new task force or tiger team isn't likely to make your company good at something that it has repeatedly failed at.

Once you find what you do well, keep repeating it and do a little better each time. Make sure the results are visible to the rest of your company. Use the momentum and motivation that successes generate to drive more success.

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It's never too late.

A friend of mine had a saying which I've always liked. "It's never too late to become the person you've always wanted to be." It might be a well known quotation from someone famous. I'm not sure, but I've always attributed it to my buddy, Jim.

I admire Jim because he is the kind of person who decides what he wantes to do and then somehow figures out a way to be able to do it. For example, at one point he decided that he wanted to spend a few years in Europe. And he got a job and a flat in the UK. He wanted to become a writer. He studied writing relentlessly. He even attended a writing school. Not every move he made was the smartest (sorry, Jim), but he wasn't afraid to keep trying. And, eventually, he usually got there.

The same thing is true in business. It's never too late. There is no reason you have to keep doing the same thing over and over just because that's what you've been doing in the past. You need to constantly be working to refine your processes and your business.

In the book Good to Great, Jim Collins (not the Jim from the first paragraph) talks about the breakthroughs that great companies have made. This is the point of transition where a company seemingly pulls itself out of mediocracy into greatness. This is the point where you start to see articles mentioning the company published on a regular basis. This is the point where their stock chart hits the heel of that hockey stick shape and starts to rise rapidly.

The interesting thing is that none of the companies that Collins talks about could point to any one defining moment that pushed them into greatness. The dramatic positive change was simply the result of many previous smaller tweaks that each company had made. At some point, the convergence of all of these tweaks begins to drive the company forward to become something that is more than the sum of it's individual parts.

Just like my friend, Jim, and the great companies that Jim Collins talks about, your company can become what you want it to be. You can't let your short-term obstacles stop you from trying new things and constantly refining your business.

Jim had to pay his bills and feed and clothe himself just like everyone else on the planet. He didn't have a trust fund or a windfall from some dot-com sellout. But he also didn't make excuses. He took action.

Just like my buddy, the great companies Jim Collins talks about all had significant short-term pressures that they had to deal with. But they never lost sight of what they wanted to become and they made the changes necessary to get there in spite of their circumstances and other pressures.

What action can you take today to help your company become the business you've always wanted?


photo credit, iamwahid

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Startup Spotlight: Reza Hussein on Jambool

Recently, I had the opportunity to talk with Reza Hussein, the CTO and co-founder of Jambool about their recent $5 million round of funding and about how Jambool got on the road to success.

Some background on Jambool. It was co-founded in 2006 by Hussein and his business partner Vikas Gupta. Both partners are long-time veterans of Amazon and worked with each other while there. Hussein and Gupta both had a desire to break out on their own and do "something different." Jambool originally produced web-based collaborative research applications and games that run on social networks such as Facebook. Indeed, they have several popular applications currently in heavy use on Facebook. About a year ago, the team decided to move away from the end-user applications space and develop Social Gold, a payments system for use in managing virtual currencies. It was this move that provided Jambool with their greatest success and led to the recent round of funding.

Hussein describes Social Gold as "a seamless in-app payments system for social games and applications with analytics for optimizing your virtual economy" in comparison with some other competitors who he describes as "analytics systems with payments" or just "basic payments systems". The space does seem to be heating up. In fact, there have been a couple of recent acquisitions in the space over the last year or so. Spare Change was acquired by PlaySpan earlier this year and Two Fish was scooped up by Live Gamer last month.

In some ways, even PayPal could be considered a competitor to these micropayment management systems. Hussein explained that while their system is primarily used in online games today, its functionality certainly doesn't limit it to that market. He says that their real target is any site which offers the use of a digital asset or a virtual currency in exchange for real money. The one parameter they insist on is that the virtual currency must be based on a real-world monetary system.

Some games or applications have multiple virtual currencies. Some currencies are "earned" as you gain more experience. Other currencies are purchased with real money. It's the latter of these currency types that Jambool is focused on. Anyone who has played World of Warcraft or used Wii points to download an application to their Wii console has used a virtual currency.

It seems like there is a new type of virtual currency popping up every day on some new application or game on the various social media sites. Hussein predicts that someday virtual currencies may be as reliable and valuable as Dollars or Euros. (Now we just need someone to develop an exchange to help us convert our Green Patch points into World of Warcraft points.)

The prospect of this exploding market could be part of what got Madrona and Bay Partners to dive in on this recent $5 million series B funding round. In addition, Hussein explained some of his other theories about why Madrona and Bay bet on Jambool.

He said that over the past couple of years Jambool has tried to attack several different markets in this area of social or collaborative applications. Each step of the way, they have kept Madrona and Bay Partners in the loop, constantly running ideas by them and getting feedback. They picked their funding partners, in part, because Hussein and Gupta knew people there who were familiar with the their background at Amazon and believed that the combination of Hussein and Gupta made a good team. Their history of working together and having proven that they could deliver is part of what made Jambool a good bet.

In addition to their successes at Amazon, they had shown Madrona and Bay that they had the ability to deliver results on their own. Many of Jambool's apps are consistently ranked in the very top of the pack based on number of users. The team had shown that they were able to take an unknown business, an unproven business plan and create a name in the industry that is now widely recognized by application developers in their space.

Hussein told me that the obstacles that once seemed so large are now small in retrospect. He recalled the difficulty of the days when they were trying to just get their foot in the door and get their product "out there". (Note: stay tuned for more information on marketing and PR for early stage businesses next week when I'll share my discussion with Gail Kent of The Buzz Factory.)

Hussein credits several things with getting over their obstacles. They brought on a full-time person responsible for business development. They also found an advisor who helped point them in the right direction. Hussein insists that having an advisor is paramount to a start up. He explains that it should be someone who isn't like you. You want to make sure that you get a different perspective on your ideas.

The team also made sure they were very "pluged-in" to their industry. They knew the space, in part, because they had worked on payment related software while at Amazon. Many of the people who now work at Jambool worked with them at one time or another at Amazon. They also knew many of the developers of other Facebook applications through their previous application development experience. Staying close to those developers helped them tap into that network. This helped them understand what their customers wanted and gave them insight into features that resonated.

Hussein also said that getting funding was "not as easy as it was before, but we did as well as anyone else." We discussed the fact that the days of getting funding for an idea written on a cocktail napkin are long gone. Today, you need to build something great, keep metrics on your business and then ask for funding. Hussein reiterated how important it is to be able to demonstrate your track record with real metrics.

Additionally, Hussein made one last interesting point. When we talked about Jambool's change from collaborative applications to social gaming to payments, he said that sometimes you have to be willing to throw out some things that you might have worked very hard on for a very long time to focus on what will make you successful.

In summary: get an advisor, build something that resonates, stay tuned-in to your industry, keep good metrics and track your progress. Remember that you need to prove to your funding partners why you are a good bet. A proven track record is the best way to do that. Make sure you keep your partners in the loop.

CrunchBase Information

Jambool

Madrona Venture Group

Bay Partners

Information provided by CrunchBase

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