I have seen a lot of bad management on different levels of an organization. I have been in the weeds when bad decisions were implemented, I have talked to fellow employees about it, and I have always been on the bottom rung. I have identified some important areas that affect a workforce.

1. Relationships
Building relationships are key in being able to properly manage anything. Creating a good rapport with people is important because if management is responsible for making the first step towards building a relationship, it makes it easier for employees to accept it. When it comes to working with people, a solid relationship will create a better product by eliminating time that gets wasted through interpersonal friction, finger pointing, and lack of communication.

2. Transparency, Trust and Honesty
Transparency, trust and honesty make up some of the most important pillars of a relationship. Being transparent is more than just a declaration. Transparency is an honest communication of facts. Honestly communicating what goes on builds trust and reinforces a team mentality. At the end of the day, everyone should feel that they are working on the same team. Because if a company is aligned with the same principle, that is when a team can perform at it’s best.

3. Verbiage
The words that we use can have a major impact on what we perceive, or don’t perceive. Working in the software industry a word that is often thrown around is “resources”. A project comes down the pipeline and the question is asked, “do we have resources for that?”. This statement implys more than what meets the eye. When it comes down to the reality of things, “resources” don’t build products, people do. People have skill sets that are comprised of strengths and weaknesses. So it is a huge discredit to a project to refer to the people building products as merely “resources”. Something else that I hear get thrown around is, “we need to hire the right fit”. In reality my “right fit” is different from your “right fit” is different from the companies “right fit”. So while saying, “the right fit”, sounds nice to most people; it is meaningless to everyone but yourself. So, instead of just referring to “the right fit”, refer to what your looking for specifically so more people understand exactly what you are looking for; it will make you look like you actually know what your doing.

4. Community
Throughout my professional career, I have found that it is the time spent outside of work that builds the best working relationships. In terms of teamwork, I have worked the best with the people that I have bridged the gap, at least a little bit, between colleague and friend. After a happy hour with colleagues, you bond and can interact with out the pressure of work looming overhead. You can get a better insight to who they are as people, and that information helps you not only see issues from their perspectives, which can work wonders for productivity.

5. Employee Investment
Companies who don’t invest in their employees will have a much more difficult time building a sustainable long term workforce. I am confident that a lot of people will agree that software is a quickly changing industry. New models for design and interaction, new styles of programming, new solutions; these are all important aspects to be on top of for a business. They all have different ways that they interact with your clients, and they are all important for the overall brand of a company. Investing in an opportunity for employees to go to professional events, will show your employees that you care about them, and serve your product better. The worst feeling employees can get, is the feeling that they are as dispensable as the daily paper.

6. Know your Employees
There are several generations in today’s workforce. Each generation has nuanced ways of working, and to be as competitive as possible you need to leverage strengths correctly. Generation X and the Millenial generations are going to be the major generations to study. Knowing that a Millenial is going to be very motivated by ideals and a sense of self satisfaction, is to a companies best interest. Knowing how to spot the motivations and implications of hiring “trophy kids” or “latch key kids”, can really help a company best use the strengths of the individuals. Study up on generational traits and behaviors because efficient use of people is a key in a strong product.

7. The best employees work for fun on their own
It is hard to argue that someone who is passionate about their work, won’t be a worth while hire. If an employee has a track record of doing what they love, and what they love is what your hiring the for, it is a win-win situation. You pay them for doing what they love and will do anyway, they reward you with a high quality product they poured their heart into; can’t really ask for much more than that.

8. Outsourcing is a tool that can easily be misused
Outsourcing is a tricky fence to balance on. In one hand, you have a financial breakdown. On paper you compare salary and benefits, and the choice is easy. In the other hand you don’t really have all the pieces of the puzzle that can’t be nicely put on paper. I feel that people don’t take into consideration all of the sides of the outsourcing rubix cube. In my experience, those who outsource get what they pay for. Quality is comprised, communication breaks down through the language and cultural barrier, and time is wasted because the rest of ones team is in another part of the world. It can play a key role in making employees feel dispensable, and it hurts the home countries economy to a degree. There is a reason people come to the US for school, because the education is good. Good educations help to insure quality products, third world countries make it more difficult to find people with the educations needed to make a good software product.

So, that is my rant about some things that I see that tend to hurt business.

Innovation is a game that some companies who choose to play must know the rules of in order to be successful. Innovation is more than a buzzword, it is controlled chaos. Innovation is the chaotic explosion that creates heat and fire, that then pushes a piston to create linear energy that then gets turned into rotary motion, that makes it’s way to move one’s business forward.

Monetizing true innovation is a tricky balance of calculated failure and funding. I don’t have an end-all be-all list of all the things any company can do to be a profitable innovator. I do however, have a short list that I feel is a good starting point. I don’t think that innovation is a cookie cutter formula that can be applied to any company. If there is, then I feel it would have to be at too high of a level to be useful to anyone.

1. Learn from mistakes
True innovation and mistakes go hand in hand. If you are doing something stable, reliable and easy; you are not a true innovator. Mistake is not a bad word, it describes a condition where you expect something to happen that doesn’t. Failure comes from not learning anything from your mistake. If you work to make an innovative product and you don’t get what you expected, there is valuable information to learn that you should hold closely and apply to your next project.

2. Hire people who can identify unusual patterns
Innovation comes from the unusual patterns that occur in life. People who have a natural tendency to make far off connections and identify non intuitive patterns, are the ones who can do a great deal for an innovative company. What you want is to take what you learned from your mistakes and be able to apply them to other industries or use them to create new products. This quality is a tricky one to interview for but will be worth it in the long run.

3. Uncover needs from wants
Innovation is rarely about answering the call of what consumers merely want. It is about creating a solution to what consumers need. Distilling the need from the want can be quite a task. If a consumer says that they want a hole in their floor so they can watch their kids play, the role of the professional is to realize that the consumer doesn’t want a hole in their floor. A hole is going to be dangerous and ugly and will devalue their house. Their need is to watch their kids, not a hole. A valuable solution would be to install a camera downstairs that they can remove when they sell the house and is installed with a couple screws along with a monitor; or even to move the kids upstairs. Discovering what will truly meet a need is what is going to get consumers to buy a product.

4. Be agile enough to spend money in the right place
Most business’s don’t tend to be able to make money off of innovative products alone. A said business typically has a strong money maker that funds the innovation. It can be easy to spend all of a companies money on creating new products and innovating, but a company can’t lose sight of the original money maker. A company needs to understand that products need to be kept up to date to stay competitive, and by ignoring the original cash cow it is not a sustainable business practice.

5. Create a culture of innovation
Through the experience that employees have in working with a company, employees can be infused with the creative though process’s that fuel innovation. I have seen companies take down cubicle walls to foster communication to give all employees cubes to foster focus. I have seen companies have all you can drink soda and all you can drink beer. Each companies needs are as different as the employees they hire. Each companies culture and innovation comes from different places and must have a custom solution. Realizing the best way to create this is for a particular company well worth the effort.

6. Set your expectations
You must face the facts innovation is: risky, expensive, difficult, time consuming, and chaotic. If that is forgotten too easily and not accepted from the get go, the end goal can be easily lost.