Category: Business

Wouldn’t it be great if you could be in a section of an office, surrounded by intelligent people, working on projects that really mattered to you personally, and never having to interact with the rest of the company? I know a lot of people who would consider that a dream job. I would hate it.

Don’t get me wrong, as an engineer, the first few days would be delightful. Lots of interesting conversations over coffee. Working on engineering projects that are just purely interesting, regardless of how they fit into the company. That sounds fun – for a bit.

And there’s the rub. Within a few days, I’d start asking myself, “Why am I working on this?”. “What is it accomplishing, and where does it fit into the company’s goals?”. I shouldn’t live in a vacuum, nor should my engineering team.

How about we take a better approach? One that starts to ask those salespeople, “What does the customer want?”. One that starts to ask accounting if I have a budget and asks HR how hard it would be if I needed to staff up. And how about asking the CEO what goals they’re trying to accomplish? You can learn a lot if you just ask.

Somewhere along the line, we’ve forgotten that we need to accomplish the company’s goals – not ours. If you’re running your engineering team in a vacuum, it’s not good for the company, and it’s probably not good for your career.

I’ve run a few companies over the years, and one inevitably wants out of contact with you. Maybe they’re going out of business, or their business has changed and they no longer need your services. To make this decision, you need to weigh some data:

• What is the value of the contract they want out of compared to your entire customer revenue stream? A small percentage or a large one?
• What are the circumstances of their situation? Are they going out of business (inevitable) or just wanting a new vendor?
• Are you ready to ruin the relationship with the people at that company if you insist they pay?
• Will the outlay to collect the money (lawyers and collection agencies) be worth the value of their contract?

The idea here is to look at the bigger picture. Sure, collecting revenue from a customer on a signed contract seems like your legal right, but what is the bigger picture? If you insist on it, it will create friction and a rift. Are these people you’re dealing with going to go to other places and have a permanent memory of your inability to work with them on this issue? Or will you be a reasonable vendor – someone they’d like to do business with again at their new job?

Transactions create memories. The good ones can be memorable and often result in further business. The bad ones create memories that are hashed over and over, spreading the bad outcome. What kind of memory do you want to create?

I’ve started, run, and sold a few successful companies. Each one was different from the last one because I was constantly learning. But early on, I took on a management method that I used throughout my career – I ran each as a Benevolent Dictatorship. Now before you go looking it up on Wikipedia, it’s a term I used with my own definition.

A Benevolent Dictatorship, in my terms, means I was very interested in other opinions on problems as they often brought me to see new ideas. Opinions of others added a perspective that fleshed out details I didn’t previously see., and with rare exceptions, I relished each one. But regardless of how many I listened to, the proverbial buck stopped with me. I made the final decisions and was responsible for their outcome – good or, sometimes, unfortunately, bad.

If you’re going to run any organization, there’s a temptation to run it “By Committee”, pushing away decisions, so it makes it easier to wag a finger when they don’t produce great results. But it’s harder to take responsibility. It’s harder to run a Benevolent Dictatorship. It’s harder to shoulder the responsibility and be ready to take on the consequences. But if you don’t, who will?