Vlad Mazek – Vladville Blog

Let’s not beat around the bush, there is only one way to be more productive: do less.

How we go about doing less is endless and it’s a continuously evolving process: The challenge of having less meetings leaves worse communication across the organization or even worse, transforms the message.

I’m a quintessential micromanager.

I’m by far the most annoying one on the planet.

All of our offices have whiteboards.

The conference room itself spotlights the whiteboard which stretches along the 25’ long conference room. It’s the first and last thing you see. Conference room table is from IKEA. The chairs are from whatever furniture store had an online special the day I furnished it.

I walk into staff offices and I just start drawing what I want.

“Hey, I had this brilliant idea. Let’s find a way to do _____”

Everyone here loves it.

Well, that’s a lie. They hate it with all their passion.

Nothing kills productivity like having someone butt in during the middle of your task, interrupt you “just a minute” and then leave you to figure out to figure out where to resume.

This is such a problem that some people establish idiotic policies like not answering the phone in the office, not returning calls on certain days, checking email once a day, banning all sorts of productivity resources and tasks.

And every single one of the people to stoop to the lows described above will claim up and down that their method changed their life. Jury is out whether it’s for better or worse. And the customer base is out to decide what type of extreme behavior they find tolerable to do business with you.

So here is my insane process:

I have about two months to go till my next baby is here.

I actually love my wife so I’d like to take time off and help her during the final weeks of the pregnancy, deal with nesting, etc.

This means that I can’t have my usual menagerie of animals busting down the door or counting on me, in any way.

But I still need to be on top of it.

So now instead of dealing with a bunch of people, I deal with four.

From a workplace where my staff knows the door is always open and that I’m involved extensively on the dev side – and my hours – it’s been a bit of a change adjusting to the fact that I can’t be everywhere and everyone to everything.

We’ve also gone away from “delegating” to actually owning the issue.

This means you’re in charge of X. If a monkey fails doing X, it’s now your job to fix it or replace them. I don’t want to hear from your monkeys, I don’t care how or why things are going, all I care is the milestones.

Sacrifices:

I can no longer micromanage.

I still do to an extent but I’ve dumped the Cramer routine where I bust in the door and ask someone to put the person they are with on hold before I lose the light bulb.

Instead, I’m jotting stuff down in my LV notebook more, drawing more and letting people find a way to do it.

It’s also taken a bit away from accountability. I’ve always been the one to apologize when things fell apart. Now I am not a part of it. I can’t apologize… because, honestly… I don’t feel sorry. Mostly because I don’t even know how the problem started, how it was projected, who was affected for how long. I feel bad in general every time I drop the ball but partnerships (which is what we sell) is not something that comes across well when you’re totally disconnected.

My area: I have direct reporting from development, support and marketing. That is the current trifecta at Own Web Now, and we will soon add another one depending on some hires and product ship dates. The luxury of only having top level insight comes at a cost of productivity and communications across all levels of the organization and how our partners work with us.

Ooooooooooooooooooooooooorrrrrr does it? 🙂 Yep, teaser blog post – Tune in on Friday AM for an announcement 🙂

I wanted to take a moment to apologize to the many of you that were a part of my vocal carnage yesterday at MSPU in Washington DC and live online. My voice simply, and completely, gave out – several times, and while I tried to make the best of it I feel like I owe you an apology. Sorry for wasting your time. I’ll make it up to you.

Once upon a time people loved working with me because they only worked with me and I took an immense amount of pride in what I did. As the years have passed by, and we’ve grown, less and less of what people get from us is directly my product – so when I bomb like I did yesterday it’s hard not to think like there has been d@#% worth of progress in 14 years 😉

I do want to thank many of you who emailed and tweeted at me telling me how much you enjoyed the presentation. I appreciate the notes, even though I think most of you are probably just making fun of me 🙂 It’s always a ton of fun to put together a Vladville act, give away a Rolex, drink on stage and curse because when people stop looking at “What is this jerk trying to sell me” and start actually thinking about the solution design, positioning, marketing, differentiation, exclusivity and all the other stuff – minds open up. Sure, I hope you pick us, but making any decision is better than doing nothing. It’s one thing to sit and argue over what cloud is and what it will replace – and it’s quite a different thing to stare down the barrel of at least two dozen billion dollar companies that are aiming straight for SMB.

As someone that constantly deals with that shotgun, and has a lot of years competing in the commodity world, I’m here to help teach you how to build differentiation and talk to people who have already considered 10+ of your local competitors and are hit up by at least a dozen global ones daily. 

I’m just sorry I blew that opportunity yesterday. I’ll do an online one shortly and you’re all invited.

In the meantime, have a great holiday! I’m off to University of Florida football game tomorrow, then off to Cabo in Mexico with Alex Rogers. We’re gonna go fish for some BDRs or build a call center or something..

See ya next week!

Over the last few days I have been reading a lot of posts about small business engagement and even though they are seemingly coming from different angles, they are all looking for someone else to either accept blame for the way things are or the way things should be.

We now intentionally interrupt the jackass act that is Vladville to discuss a serious topic in a slightly lighthearted way. I hope you are not offended as its not written with intent to insult or offend.

Are you happy with yourself, professionally? Really, truly? All the time? Of course not, everyone faces a challenge in their professional life every now and then. I’m a workaholic. Mostly because I’m very impulsive and tend to plan my personal agendas poorly. This leads to weeks of 20+ hour days, 7 day weeks, working nonstop. So I tend to take a lot of breaks, come to work late, etc.

Now, that sounds very ugly put in writing like that. I think it would make me feel beet if I just blamed it on my staff, clients and suppliers. While I’m certainly and clearly the one to blame, it gives people ease in dealing with their shortcomings.

Try it: What if all your issues are caused by someone else?

Sales not doing well? I’m sure it’s the sales guys fault who would likely complain about the quality of leads that marketing obtains. They would likely blame software shipment times for inability to put together a very competitive message and its clear that software developers are the smartest people in the company so there is nothing pretty at the end of that blame trail. But man, it sure would be easy to deal with if it were someone else’s fault, right?

I have a buddy who in the entire time I’ve known him professionally hasn’t moved his business forward an inch. He travels more than most people I know, takes more vacations and fun trips a year than I have in a decade, is everywhere with everyone – but he’s always coming home to fire someone. He wonders why he is not making any headway while he blames his staff, his clients, his suppliers and virtually everyone else but himself. There is only so much bad hiring process can account for, and there is only so much fault that can be passed around before that long stare in the mirror comes down to “How am I leading this business and its people?”

It really all comes down to leadership. We all do entirely too little of it.

People are not dogs and they should not be lead in such a way. Staff should not be given a treat (bonus) every time they do good and yanked by a chain or thrown out in the rain (demotions, firing, cuts) every time they do bad. Yes we are forced to look at black and white and manage by the numbers at times – both by the government and by our organizational structure – but when you lead people it can’t all be that way.

Business owners responsibility is to lead. But leadership responsibility does not stop with the owners and management. I had written countless posts about work ethic, delivery, professionalism and standards. All of those extend from the top to the bottom. Everyone leads. Everyone has to lead. Lead people, lead with ideas, lead with solutions or lead with results. Leadership goes far beyond the battleground general. Fail at that and you’ll be the next one gone.

This week’s high (or low) topic of conversation has been about the lack of women in the IT field. Women are notoriously easy to pick on because it’s a comfortable topic that sells a rather ugly concept relatively well. But try substituting another minority in place of women and see how comfortable people get about taking a side in the debate. How about: How come there are so few black people in IT? Say that one out loud and see people start to backtrack. Sorry, I meant African Americans. Well, you know, minorities in general. Backtrack, backtrack, until you fall into a place of not trying to blame anyone and actually just lead. The best response on this topic, of few women in IT leadership, came from an actual IT leader and entrepreneur: Leah Culver. Her response? “I could keep writing about the lack of women in tech, but starting a new company sounds like a lot more fun.”

Similar topic came from Jason Beal on mspmentor.net site. It questions the responsibility of the company owner – rainmaker – continuing in building the business. What’s wrong with that question? In a nutshell it reinforces the same argument that leadership is a responsibility few people have.

Look at your star employees.

What’s the single best quality they have? I bet it’s the fact that when they take something, you can trust them to see it through.

That, in a big part has been the success behind OWN. For over a decade we’ve successfully gotten people to let us take care of their IT. We were not fired every time we had an issue. We have not raised prices either. But every day we go to work to add new features, new solutions and we’re constantly pushing forward. Yes, its bumpy at times but from the top down the mission at OWN is clear to every employee, every management layer and every product: we need to do more. How do we make this better?

Leadership is not a corporate superpower. Its not a seminar. It’s not a personality profile score. It’s a responsibility! Everyone has a part in it.

So quit your bitching, stop whining and face the fact that if you’re willing to lead, you get to pick the outcome.

Think of it this way: if you are not leading anywhere, you’re not going anywhere. And in the end, its all your fault for where you’ve ended up if you’ve just followed them there. Where would you like to go?

Google finally released their long awaited Priority Inbox. You can get the details here:

http://mail.google.com/mail/help/priority-inbox.html

In a nutshell, it’s a set of workflows that determines what gets placed at the top of your inbox – instead time, priority or alphabetical listing that you’ve gotten used to, Gmail uses sender reputation of sorts to determine whether the message should be read now, seen later or followed up at all. It does this through both an automated system (likely to track bulk mail senders) and user feedback that escalates certain senders up.

On the surface, and in my opinion only, great idea.

Underneath it, the algorithms and the tuning process leave a lot to be desired and probably not something you’d ever implement as a business solution.

For example, under this setup an unsolicited contact from someone you’ve met at a conference or a business gathering would be treated as an unknown contact and shot way to the bottom of your email. Ditto for newsletters and other bulk mail – because bacn (stuff that is sort of SPAM but you really asked for it) takes various forms of padding all the useful stuff you really want with the crap you’d rather not see, you’re likely to miss out on both important and irrelevant information.

Great Vlad, what’s your solution then?

Don’t get me wrong, this might be great for non-professional users of email. If you use email for business, there are better ways.

One thing that absolutely infuriates me is when my staff filters my mail into a Vlad folder. If I’m sending you an email and paying you to read it, I expect it to be the first thing read, even if the next message is “Hey, does anyone smell that, I think a little kitten is on fire.”

I can only imagine my clients feel similarly about how their concerns should be prioritized. So, here is my top list of dealing with the overload.

0. Always be pimping. Your mission-critical work email should be going into a process automation solution like Shockey Monkey. If it needs a response and an SLA, it should not be waiting for you to get to your email. Pimpin’ aside, here is how I manage my stuff:

1. Unsubscribe from everything you don’t always read.

2. Manage your subscriptions. If you’re an ExchangeDefender customer you can use a disposable address just by appending something to the email, ie: vlad.newsletters@ownwebnow.com will always get to me but I can filter by address and send it straight to newsletters. Send me a newsletter without my permission and you’re done for life. You can create unlimited aliases just by appending a dot at the end of it. If you’re not on ExchangeDefender, this feature is native in virtually every mail system – for Gmail it’s a + instead of a dot.

3. Avoid chain replies. I cannot stress this enough. Sometimes a 1 minute phone call will save you from wasting half an hour going back and forth over something in an email or chat. It will also make it easier to locate stuff.

4. Sort, sort, sort, sort. It only takes a second to find out how important something is. Resist the temptation to leave stuff hanging in your inbox. I have a filing system under a folder called Active with subfolders Today, Tomorrow, End of week, Next week, Next month. When I receive something that’s urgent, I don’t reply to it immediately. I move mail into the Today folder. If it’s not urgent but the client needs a response, I move it into tomorrow. If there is a deadline this week, it gets into a proper bucket.

5. Turn off all alerts, turn off email ADD. Email is not instant messaging. It does not get an immediate attention or immediate response. Resist the urge to deal with email the moment it gets there. The notion of “email overload” is in your head only. If you’re used to dealing with stuff as it comes then certainly seeing 3 pages of new messages will make you freak out. Relax. Focus. Ah, almost Karl 🙂 Look at the list. Highlight the junk you should be unsubscribing to, drag it to Unsubscribe folder. Next – what’s urgent – scan and move.

Just like some generations cannot understand the cloud because they have grown with the technology they are dependant on, some of us cannot let go of responding to email as it comes in because that is how we’re conditioned. Unfortunately, the days when email was acted on immediately also used to have phones, faxes, interoffice memos and letters. These days the only letters that come in carry either cash, ad or a lawsuit. Everything else – including those three – gets an email.

You don’t need a technical solution to this and trust me, the computer is worse at prioritizing you than you are. You need a personal management solution to this and the first step is taking a deep breath and getting a handle of your information.