William Wu Personal Blog

Ran into a site called LeadershipNow.com, it has a lot of great articles on Leadership topics.  One thing caught my eye is the article “Delegating - The Basics“.  According to the article, here are the basic principles of delegation:

• Delegation is a way of increasing your time. It allows you the freedom to focus on what you should be accomplishing and to better see the big picture.
• You should only do those tasks that nobody else can do. Determine what it is you will delegate. Look at what you do and ask yourself if this is really where you should be spending your time. All routine activities and minor decisions should be delegated to others. Also, any tasks that should be performed when you are not there or unavailable are also candidates for delegation.
• Never keep work simply because you do it better. Delegating certain tasks to others is a way of developing and endorsing those you lead. Delegating allows people to learn by doing, to take risks and to build confidence. It is one of the best ways to develop that person for further responsibilities and their own leadership responsibilities.
• Delegation is a discipline. You’ve got to work at it.

Mathematically speaking, it is easy to know the only way to raise the quality bar of the company is to hire someone better than the average performer of the company.  As a startup founder, your job of growing the company is to be able to attract and bring in people that are better than you.  Delegation means you are yielding the power to those that you have hired and you trust them to be able to “get the job done.” When you delegate, you must remember to give a clear direction and a follow up inspection.

Effective delegation develops talents and strengthens a company.  It is a win-win for both the manager and the employee.  As Agha Hasan Abedi said, “The conventional definition of management is getting work done through people, but real management is developing people through work.”

One thing that I am extremely proud of is DS-IQ’s steady growth over the years and the quality of people in the team. When DS-IQ was first founded, my partner and I decided to set our goal to build a world class team to tackle the incredible difficult problem: using modern marketing science and state-of-the-art technology to create targeted retail media.  We have since joined by senior key people from Microsoft/MSN, Amazon.com, AvenueA/aQuantive, ADVO, IBM, and Disney/Espn.com.  Check out DS-IQ’s executive team page to see if you agree.

Comments(0)

Author Bill George had a famous book called, Authentic Leadership which promotes leaders to be true to themselves.  His 2nd book, True North, is recently published.Â

According to Business Week’s review on March 12, 2007 summary, it provides 5 key facets of a leadership plan that is useful and can be applied to the startup founders. 

1. Knowing your authentic self - learn to be self-aware and seek feedback on a regular basis.
2. Focus on value and principles that matter to you
3. Discover what motivates you - the most successful leaders rarely start out wanting to get rich, they are inspired to make a difference, to test their limits, to follow a passion.  In many cases, they abandon secure posts for the unknown.
4. Build a support team
5. Forge an integrated life - augement work with family, friends, community service and exercise and whatever else matters in your life.

Be authentic, like Ralph Waldo Emerson said “To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”

Comments(0)

One big factor that people join an early startup is because of their faith in its founders. People don’t leave the startups, they leave their leaders.  Early startups do not have many management layers, therefore founders must be effective managers that know how to provide guidance, direction and support to its early employees.  Employees need a boss who sets them up for success every step of the way and helps them earn what they need. To this end, knowing how to give proper feedback is important. Feedbacks need to focus on providing directions, not criticism. 

As Roger Nierenberg, the conductor of Stamford Symphony Orchestra said: “Your job as a leader is to communicate a sense of how things could be - and to show people how to achieve that vision.  How do you do all that?  By giving direction, not criticism.  Direction tells people what to do, whereas criticism tells people what not to do.  Here’s criticism: “The percussion section is playing too loudly.” A direction is, “Make sure the audience can hear the woodwinds.”  “Direction points to the way things could be.  Criticism, on the other hand, points to the way things were.”
�

Comments(0)

Recently I read an excellent article “The Hardest Lessons for Startups to Learn” by Paul Graham. You can see the whole article here. 

Mr. Graham’s essay can be summarized as following:

• Startup should release early,release frequent,  It is hard to know exactly what the user want, so it is better to release something and let them tell you. Rrelease early makes you work harder. There is a lot more urgency once you release. Improvements beget improvements. The more you improve, the better your solution will become.
• The purpose of Improving constantly is to make users happy. One thing all startups have in common is that they can’t force anyone to do anything. They can’t force anyone to use their software, and they can’t force anyone to do deals with them. A startup has to sing for its supper. That’s why the successful ones make great things. They have to, or die.  To understand your users, the best way to do so is smashing a beam of prototypes into a beam of users. 
• Startup must fear the right thing. Disasters are normal in a startup: a founder quits, you discover a patent that covers what you’re doing, your servers keep crashing, you run into an insoluble technical problem, you have to change your name, a deal falls through– these are all par for the course. They won’t kill you unless you let them.  What you should fear, as a startup, is not the established players, but other startups you don’t know exist yet. They’re way more dangerous than Google because, like you, they’re cornered animals….you shouldn’t relax just because you have no visible competitors yet. No matter what your idea, there’s someone else out there working on the same thing. Way more startups hose themselves than get crushed by competitors. There are a lot of ways to do it, but the three main ones are internal disputes, inertia, and ignoring users.
• Determination is the most important quality in a startup founder.  In a startup, there’s always some disaster happening. So if you’re the least bit inclined to find an excuse to quit, there’s always one right there. If you lack commitment, chances are it will have been hurting you long before you actually quit. You can’t fake determination. The only way to convince everyone that you’re ready to fight to the death is actually to be ready to.
• Be flexible.  You have to be determined, but flexible, like a running back. A successful running back doesn’t just put his head down and try to run through people. He improvises: if someone appears in front of him, he runs around them; if someone tries to grab him, he spins out of their grip; he’ll even run in the wrong direction briefly if that will help. The one thing he’ll never do is stand still.
• Opportunity is always there for the right mind. There is always room for new stuff and new startup. At every point in history, even the darkest bits of the dark ages, people were discovering things that made everyone say “why didn’t anyone think of that before?” Startups make wealth, which means they make things people want, and if there’s a limit on the number of things people want, we are nowhere near it.
• Don’t count your eggs before they are hatched.  A deal is not done until it is done. Startup needs to remember things don’t happen in the smooth, predictable way they do in the rest of the world. Things change suddenly, and usually for the worse. Need to prevent leaning company against something that’s going to fall over and taking them with it.
• It is speed, not money that makes doing a startup worth it. From my own experience, I absolutely agree one of the things Mr. Graham said in the article:”(all founders) say the same thing: I knew it would be hard, but I didn’t realize it would be this hard.” Economically, a startup is best seen not as a way to get rich, but as a way to work faster. You have to make a living, and a startup is a way to get that done quickly, instead of letting it drag on through your whole life. As Ben Franklin said, if you love life, don’t waste time, because time is what life is made of. What’s important about startups is the speed. By compressing the dull but necessary task of making a living into the smallest possible time, you show respect for life, and there is something grand about that.

What a no-nonsense, elegantly written article! I highly recommend it to anyone.  It is even better if you have actually had some startup experience to know how insightful this artidle is.  Enjoy it!

Comments(0)