It’s not like it’s rocket science

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Toronto Space Apps Challenge, April 19-21, 2013

Oh wait, it is!

NASA and the European Space Agency are hosting a hackathon in 75 cities around the world. It includes Canadian events in Toronto and Winnipeg.

“The International Space Apps Challenge is a technology development event during which citizens from around the world work together to solve challenges relevant to improving life on Earth and life in space.”

The Toronto event is focusing on 24 of the challenges provided by NASA (the full list of challenges is 50 large). The challenges provide a diverse set of skills and participation. Skills include software, hardware, strategy, and design. There are a number of challenges that include the interpretation of economic data and others that involve air traffic control.

With the amazing photos that Commander Hadfield is publishing on Twitter. Hopefully there is a renewed interest in the Canadian space industry. (We did build the Canadarm…) And the commericalization of space exploration with the X PRIZE and SpaceX Dragon spacecraft. It’s an amazing chance to participate in a grassroots exploration of space technologies and data.

List of Challenges in Toronto Space Apps Challenge

ESA 3D Printing Contest
Create an open source 3D model of space hardware that can be generated by a 3D printer.
My Space Cal
Combine the past and future time schedules of satellites into a common calendar that the world can easily access.
Wish You Were Here
Develop a compelling representation of weather on Mars.
Tour of the Moon
Enable humans worldwide to take an interactive tour of the Moon.
The Blue Marble
Rethink space-based Earth imagery and make it more accessible to a broad audience of space enthusiasts.
Solar Flare
Visualize invisible (to the human eye) phenomena that can affect so many vital terrestrial activities.
Seeing Water From Space
Create a visualization of Chile water resources, showing how they have changed over time relative to changes in climate.
SCISTARTER Citizen Science
Help humans understand and analyze microbial communities and compare with microbes on the International Space Station.
Renewable Energy Explorer
Create an app that integrates wind, solar, and geothermal energy data to show where combining them would have the greatest potential.
Incentives Tied to Utility Rates
Help consumers find relevant incentives, tax rebates, and savings for their energy efficiency and renewable energy efforts.
Earth Day Challenge
Explore the history of Earth Day using environmental data since 1970.
Aligning the Stars
Match and align the stars in Aurora imagery taken by Astronauts on the International Space Station.
“Catch a Meteor” Tracker
Create an app that would allow observers of a meteor shower to trace the location, color and size of the shooting star.
Database of Near Earth Objects
Create a platform to enables citizen astronomers to register, submit findings, and help rank the findings of other citizen astronomers.
CubeSats for Asteroid Exploration
Create a CubeSat design for a mission to astroids near Earth.
Deployable Greenhouse
Develop a deployable greenhouse that could be used on a space mission to the Moon or Mars.
Hitch a Ride to Mars
Design a CubeSat for an upcoming Mars mission.
My Virtual Mentor
Expand the online presence for the NASA GIRLS program to mobile and/or tablet platforms.
“No Delays” Air Traffic Management
Create a visualization that increases understanding of the problems of our current air traffic control system.
Space Station Benefits to Humanity
Develop a tool to improve the understanding of the incredible benefits that International Space Station is delivering back to Earth.
Spot the Station
Extend the functionality of the Spot the Station site that allows you to share your sightings of the International Space Station with others.
Syncing NASA’s Open Source Projects
Create an application that mirrors changes to NASA’s github presence.
NASA’s Impact on the Economy
Share the story of NASA’s economic impact in a new and compelling way.
Adopt-a-Spacecraft: Voyager 1
Humanize the Voyager mission through the creation of a data visualization, app, or even a physical object.

It’s an amazing time to be interested in space exploration. Plan on exploring at the ROM on April 19-21, 2013.

If You Have More Than Three Priorities, You Have No Priorities

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One of my favorite sayings (with apologies to Jim Collins, author of From Good to Great) is: “If you have more than three priorities, you have no priorities.” I literally use this to run my business life – every year, my team and I agree on three high-level strategic priorities for the business. Each of my direct reports then come up with three priorities that ladder up to those business goals, each of their reports define their three goals, and then the teams work together to define three aligned performance goals for each quarter (this approach is also known as “cascading strategy“). I love this approach because it’s simple and  because by focusing on just three things, we’re able to move some pretty big rocks in the right direction.

Fine, great – but how can this help you prioritize? By taking the same approach, Every. Single. Day. First thing every morning, ask yourself the question: what are the three things you MUST do today? I write them down, and I prefer it when they are specifically aligned to our annual strategic goals (for example, are my three “to do’s” helping me generate revenue, increase awareness of SMG, or growing our capabilities in a specific area?). Then I do those three things, no matter what, no matter how long it takes to cross them off the list – ensuring that I don’t let the urgent get in the way of the important.

I’m really interested in time management and effective prioritization (“working smarter vs. longer“) – I’d love to hear about your tactics in the comments; I’m also planning to explore other systems and approaches in upcoming posts. Let me know what you’d like to hear about!

Firing People

I hate firing people. It’s the worst part of my job. Even after all these years I still spend days or even weeks agonizing over a decision to let someone go. I feel absurd complaining about this, given that of course it’s a hundred times worse for the person being fired than it is for me. Still, I hate firing people.

My first firing at Top Hat was our VP Sales. He was employee number two, he joined right after we raised our angel round. In retrospect it was doomed from the start, and it was entirely my fault. I had no idea what I was doing when it came to building a sales organization and brought him into a role that didn’t make sense (read about the lessons learned in building a sales team). It took me 6 months before I finally pulled the trigger. In the end, it was undoubtedly the right decision and set the company back on track. But at the time it was an extremely tough call. It was admitting failure – to myself and to our investors – that this first major hire was a mistake. I felt  ashamed about it for months and kept convincing and re-convincing myself that we could still make it work.

As a general rule once you’ve lost faith in an employee, things rarely get better. You can sometimes fix a skill-level problem by giving someone time to grow, but you can never fix a personality problem. If you’ve identified that someone isn’t a fit you need to move on it quickly and decisively. The longer you wait the worse it will be for both parties.

Firing is an essential part of running a successful company.

In a narrow way, it’s actually more important than hiring. You could, in theory, use a shit-against-the-wall style hiring strategy and as long as you filter out the bad apples quickly enough you’ll be able to build up a functional team over time. Of course that’s probably not the best approach.

The reality is that even the most effective interviewers are rarely more than 70% or 80% accurate. The average interviewer is quite a bit worse than that and isn’t much better than chance – often even worse, because the naive approach just selects people who are great in interviews, which disproportionately selects for bullshitters. However, even if you’re some kind of super-human talent screening machine with a 95% success rate, that 5% will accumulate and degrade the culture until you’re surrounded by bozos.

The Best Firing Process is a Better Hiring Process

Of course the best “firing process” is not to have to fire people, which can only be done through effective hiring. That being said, not having an effective firing process is like not having an immune system – the first cold will eventually kill you.

It’s fairly common knowledge these days that A players only like to work with other A players. A slightly more subtle observation is that someone’s status as an A player isn’t fixed. Bringing a weak player onto a team has a tendency to poison the culture and downgrade the rest of the team (especially if that weak player has a shitty attitude.) This bad apple syndrome has been observed to happen fairly reliably in studies on organizational dynamics.

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The Bad Apple Syndrome

We’ve experience this at Top Hat a couple of times. One of the most instructive was with our inside sales team. Early on when we were in a pinch to fill the team we lowered our standards and brought on a few people that we should have passed on. The results were disastrous. The quality of the team degraded and eventually hurt not only the inside team but also other parts of the company that came into contact with it. It took nearly a year of solid effort to rebuild the team. For a time it seemed hopeless. No matter what changes we put in place, no matter how much talent we threw at the team, the cancer of negativity and poor morale just wouldn’t go away. The most profound mistake we made in the process of trying to fix the team was to keep those who were performing well but had a negative attitude.

There was a pattern we observed a few times: we’d put a new person into the team, their performance would be great and they’d be super enthusiastic. Then like clockwork after a week or two their numbers would slowly drop, and they’d become engrossed in the culture of negativity and gossip. It was only after the cleared out the ringleaders who were perpetuating the negativity (who happened to have decent performance numbers!) and put in strong positive management that things finally began to change. The most amazing thing is that many of the people who were B or even C players when the team was dominated by negativity shot up to solid A player status. The overall output of the team per person went up by nearly 300%. In addition it seems as though life was trying to setup a lab experiment for us to prove just how much things had improved – we had a person who had left the company a few months prior re-join the team. His feedback was that he was blow away, he couldn’t believe it was the same team.

Lessons Learned

The first lesson we learned was that no matter how strapped for manpower you are, no matter how much it seems like the world will end if you don’t fill a position, compromising on the quality of talent will surely be more damaging. Second, we learned that in fixing a damaged team the key is to identify the cultural sources of the underlying problem and focus on those. Finally, we learned to use a divide and conquer approach – we would pull all the top talent into a separate team while rehabilitating the broken remaining team separately – it really helped prevent the “negativity cancer” from spreading while we were fixing things. These are simple things in retrospect, but it took a while to pull it off.

One of the most revealing questions I tend to ask when interviewing potential managers is whether they’ve ever had to make the decision to fire someone. The answer and subsequent discussion usually tells you two things: first, it tells you if the person has ever had to deal with the most difficult problems in management, second it tells you if they know how to handle those problems through the process they followed. Assuming the person has ever had to hire and manage a team of a decent size for any length of time, it’s almost certain they’ve made hiring mistakes, and their answer tells you that they know how to detect and correct these mistakes. If the person simply walked into a mature team, or has had HR handle all the hiring/firing decisions for them, then they’ve been living on easy street.

The process of firing someone is always somewhat unique to each situation. That being said there are some basic principles that you should always follow:

  1. Give people plenty of notice and regular feedback. Give people several chances to improve. The actual firing should never be a surprise – if it is then you almost certainly did something wrong in setting expectations. Depending on the role the whole process should take 1-2 months (longer for senior roles.)
  2. Try to be generous with severance and leave the person in a good spot to find their next employment. I know it’s not always possible in a startup, but do what you can. It’s the decent thing to do.
  3. Take time to reassure the rest of the team and explain (with discretion) the process that was followed and why the decision was made. Letting someone go is always a huge morale hit (even if the person wasn’t well liked, it still scares people.) You need to make people understand that their job is not in danger.

Firing someone is always a brutal experience. Anyone who says otherwise is either lying or is a psychopath. That being said, it’s unfortunately a necessary evil and understanding when and why it needs to be done is essential to the success of any business.