With iPhone, blackberry, android and phone 7 one dollar applications are changing the way businesses did business.

It is easier than ever to be a guerilla business. You are suddenly depending on low costs and high volumes to keep you going.

In this market, what happens when we download your four dollar application (a little over a cup of coffee) and run into trouble.

When we walk into a coffee joint, pay four dollars for a cup of coffee and end up not liking it, we twitch our eye brows and forget the bad experience with a couple of passing comments.

But what happens when as users, we expect you to support us for a product that is priced at the range of a cup of coffee and doesn't do what we expected it to do?

This is when deep down inside, we really don't expect you to wow us with quick responses. But then this is also your chance to do just that. After all even the best coffee shops are the ones that listen.

If you are going to be the next software development coffee shop around the block, be the one with a friendly guy who greets you with a smile and listens when you don't like his (or her) coffee.

We've come full circle and the rules of making your customers happy have not changed all that much.

Are you building the next one dollar application? That is no excuse for lousy customer support. There was never a reason to not listen, even when all you were running was a coffee shop around the block.

We are calling your bluff.

Now go, surprise us.

Who's driving the innovation in your organization? How many products or projects are on the ideas of individual engineers?

I'm not talking about allowing programmers to introduce minor features in the product. I am talking about full blown products here which take sizable time and organizational support to build. Engineers building full blown applications like teams of artists painting amazing pictures based on their own visualization.

There are two benefits to letting your programmers drive innovation in your organization.

1. They have built in bullshit busters in their heads and can sense what will sell and what wont.
2. They tend to be much more intrinsically motivated when they are working on their own ideas.

Go jot down the list of products that your organization is offering. How many of these product ideas came from "management" Vs. how many of them emerged out of "engineering" teams?

If you are wondering why your engineers aren't creating products that kick some serious butt, or why your products miss that final "wow factor" your answer might lie in the fact that your engineers aren't intrinsically motivated.

When you see engineers as cogs who build ideas that others think of and occasionally make a few changes here and there, that is exactly how your engineers work.

When you see engineers as artists, they will paint awesome pictures that make a dent in the universe.

What do you see your engineers as?

Just a little something to think about.

After countless days of slogging J's team ships the build. In a few minutes of sending the email out they receive this response from their manager:

"The release notes had lots of typos. I had to fix those before sending the build out to the client. We need to be careful about running a spell-check before sending out project documentation."

When your team slogs for days shipping a build and all you can see are typos in the release notes you my friend are acting like a fully qualified asshole.

Here's a free advice if you want to get better at working with geeks: Open Microsoft word, fix the damn typos, don't bitch about them, thank the team for their hard work and move on.

Most managers cannot resist the temptation of whining about small mistakes which they can easily fix themselves in no time.

Reasons why most managers say they "have to" whine:

1. People need to know about these mistakes so that they don't make them the next time.
2. People need to be trained so that they don't always depend on the manager to do last minute fixes.

Reasons why most managers really whine:

1. Managers are inherently good at advertising work. That is a huge part of what they do for a living. When it's their own work, expect the advertisement to be louder than ever.
2. Most managers have a complex about not being productive enough OR not contributing enough. "I was able to find an issue and fix it! MYSELF! I finally showed those pesky developers that even I can contribute!" – this opportunity is often too tempting for most managers to let go.

Success breeds success and while it is OK to point out mistakes objectively, when you give out the vibe that says "you have failed me but that’s okay, I fixed it anyway" on every small mistake your team makes, you are diminishing their chances of success in the long run.

Acknowledge success, stop discouraging people by focusing on their mistakes and start motivating them by focusing on their success.  Even if you had to fix their mistakes or provide cover fire to a team worthy of it, in most cases, they really don’t need to know about it. So stop bitching and do a little bit of clean up yourself.

Just saying.

"I am looking forward to join a Multinational with a larger employee strength and more structured process".

When 'R' says this in an interview, she hasn't even bothered to glean through our website to know that we don't believe in large teams and our process is lighter than most BDUF shops.

That makes our organization a misfit for her.

Since interview is a two way process where candidates should reject the organizations that don't fit their needs, would she like to end the interview immediately and reject our organization?

When asked this question, she reacts as if we just dropped a dead rat on the table and asked her to clean up the stinking carcass. Clearly, the interview isn't going well for her.

After some more probing a switch turns somewhere and she flips into a totally honest mode.

You can feel it. She stops lying and getting stuck. Now she describes her real reason for looking for a job.

A higher paycheck.

During the course of the interview we figure out that she is in fact underpaid and her reasons for an expectation for a higher salary are absolutely valid.

I am guessing that what had happened here was that she was 'mentored' and told to stay away from mentioning salary as a reason for quitting because that is a cliché.

When interviewing the only two rules that often work are honesty and openness.

In situations like the one 'R' was in, staying away from Cliché's is also a cliché.

If you genuinely believe that you are underpaid and if that is your sole reason for changing jobs, having the ability to stand up for it with honesty and openness doesn't make you sound bad. Lying or trying to make up reasons does.

When you are honest and open, you showcase yourself in an as-is condition.

If you can carry your true self without being ashamed or trying to hide who you are and what moves you, your chances of getting selected in a mature organization are that much higher. If you get rejected for who you are or something that you truly believe in, your chances of finding another organization where your core values are aligned with the organization's core values are that much higher.

Don't bitch in an interview. Don't whine. Don't cry. Don't keep constantly complaining.

At the same time If you are genuinely underpaid and you truly and deeply believe that you deserve a respectable salary, don't try to sugar coat the situation with random made up reasons for quitting which people tell you will 'sound good' during an interview.

Salary being the only reason for leaving is a scar on your face, but then depending on how you carry yourself, scars can also look good.

The nitpicking saga between J (real name withheld for obvious reasons) and his team lead had been on for months. Every small mistake J was making was being highlighted and all his contribution were not even being discussed.

J had been working late nights for a few weeks at his workplace.  On the last week of his project J having nothing on his plate decides to call it an early day and heads home at around 8:00 in evening.

The next day his technical lead escalates the issue of J not being proactive about his work. Leaving early when you are on a critical project is unacceptable.

Unable to understand what is going on, J tries to patch things up by having an open candid conversation with his team lead who isn't in office for the entire day.

At around 10:00 in the evening J sees his lead on IM and summons up enough courage to send him a message asking him if he was mad at J and if there is anything J could do to improve a sour professional relationship between them.

And the response from his team lead?

It goes like this: "Are you sending this message on a high? Are you drunk!?"

As J narrates this incident to me over a casual conversation some highlights emerge:

1. In J's organization open candid one on one conversations are so rare and unheard of that nobody believes that is what you are trying to do even if you start an open conversation with your manager.
2. In J's organization cases of IM flames by drunk employees to their managers are so common that most team leads see precisely that even when you are trying to have a perfectly healthy discussion that can bridge gaps.

Makes you wonder if the cases of drunk IM flaming that J's organization is so concerned about are really cases of drunk IM flaming or  just perfectly sane employees trying to summon up enough courage to have perfectly sane conversations over IM?

Wow! Talk about invisible gorillas!

When you come face to face with monkeys in their natural habitat most animal experts will give you one advice. Do *not* smile at them.

Monkeys (and most other animals) interpret the display of teeth as an act of aggression.

Showing teeth is way of scaring the enemy before a monkey attacks.

Smile at a monkey and he will show you his teeth back. Keep smiling and you are instigating the monkey to strike.

Human beings on the other hand use smiles to connect to others and to make each other feel good.

Even though we share some behavior patterns with primates our reasons for smiling are very different than there. A simple lesson that most managers it seems need to be taught explicitly.

"No, No, No, No, there is nothing I can do about it. You need to finish this in the given timeline." - how many times have you seen your manager give that response with a stupid grin on his face.

Management Advice: This is not a time to be smiling.

The least you can offer as a manager in times like this is empathy. An inappropriate grin in situations like these is an indication that you still see a grin as an act of aggression or intimidation.

And no, developers don't like working with monkeys.

When you are leading teams, your smiles, your body language, your tone and a whole lot of other aspects are being judged implicitly and automatically by the people you work with.

So, if you are wondering why no one tells your about their quitting plans or why no one ever invites you to team parties, maybe that is because you give us that stupid grin when you should be empathizing with your developers.

Just saying.

He is detail oriented. He takes care of every single little detail while writing his code. He sees slightest of deviations between the design and the implementation. He is the kick ass alpha geek in the team.

Attention to detail is a major  plus in his professional life and that is a GOOD thing, till the time he starts leading a team as a technical manager.

Then before you know it, he is knit picking on how many days people in his team should be taking time off. Why do you need eight days for a vacation?

He is estimating how many man hours an engineer should take to get a task done because he himself could have done it in a day.

The same attention to detail that makes you an amazing engineer usually ends up making you an amazing asshole when you start managing people.

There are two lessons to learn from this. 1) Before you promote someone and give him a team to work with, measure their ability to detach themselves from the level of detail that they should not be bothered about. 2) When you are working as a technical manager most of the time your ability to trust others, empathize with their problems, helping them out when they are stuck and your ability to provide intrinsic motivation which makes people want to excel and do the right thing is much more important than your attention to every single insignificant piece of information floating around in your universe.

I'm not saying switching attention to detail is essentially always a bad thing. When you are a geek attention to detail comes naturally to you. But when you are managing teams sometimes "actively forgetting" that an Engineer said he was going to check in his code today but ended up taking one extra day to do an awesome job, is also equally important.

Just saying.

As programmers we spend countless hours getting thrilled by tweaking small things which have huge impact on the applications we build. You want to run the same application, with the same hardware and load, 10x faster? Put a kick ass programmer on the problem and give him all the time in the world. Chances are that he will come up with better code that takes lesser memory, lesser processing cycles and runs blazing fast. And he would have done it by tweaking small things here and there. Tweaking things to make them better is fine grained in our brain as a programmers. We cannot resist the temptation of tweaking things when we know that they are going to have a huge impact on the overall product.

Practitioners of positive psychology do just  the same kind of tweaking but with your brain which is why I find books on positive psychology hugely fascinating. Shawn Achor in his book the Happiness Advantage talks about understanding the tweaking the human mind to cultivate new good habits and to turn your resolutions of changes into success stories rather than stories of failures with a tragic end.

Shawn's premise is two fold. 1) That we are creatures of habit and habits are how our brains are wired to work. 2) we have limited amount of will power in our brain. He explains the first premise that we as human beings are bundles of habit:

In my mind, though, the greatest contribution William James made to the field of psychology is one that was a full century ahead of his time. Humans, James said, are biologically prone to habit, and it is because we are “mere bundles of habits” that we are able to automatically perform many of our daily tasks—from brushing our teeth first thing in the morning to setting the alarm before climbing into bed at night. It is precisely because habits are so automatic that we rarely stop and think about the enormous role they play in shaping our behavior, and in fact our lives.

After all, if we had to make a conscious choice about every little thing we did all day, we would likely be overwhelmed by breakfast. Take this morning as an example: I am guessing that you didn't wake up, walk into the bathroom, look quizzically into the mirror, and think to yourself, "Should I put on clothes today?" You didn’t have to debate the pros and cons.

You didn’t have to call on your reserves of will power. You just did it the same way you probably combed your hair, gulped your coffee, locked your front door, and so on. And, excepting the exhibitionists in the reading public, you did not have to remind yourself all day to keep these clothes on. It was not a struggle. It didn't deplete your reserves of energy or brainpower. It was second nature, automatic, a habit.

None of this seems particularly groundbreaking to us today. But what William James concluded was indeed crucial to our understanding of behavioral change. Given our natural tendency to act out of habit, James surmised, couldn’t the key to sustaining positive change be to turn each desired action into a habit, so that it would come automatically, without much effort, thought, or choice? As the Father of Modern Psychology so shrewdly advised, if we want to create lasting change, we should “make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy.” Habits are like financial capital forming one today is an investment that will automatically give out returns for years to come.

Shawn also goes on to explains how our brain uses our practice and habits to form neural pathways which ultimately make us really good at an activity:

This is also how we become skilled at an activity with practice. For instance, the first time you try to juggle, the neural pathways involved are unused, and so the message travels slowly. The more time you spend juggling, the more these pathways get reinforced, so that on the eighth day of practice, the electrical currents are firing at a much more rapid pace. This is when you’ll notice that juggling comes easier, requires less concentration, and that you can do it faster. Eventually, you can be listening to music, chewing gum, and having a conversation with someone else, all while those three oranges are flying through the air. Juggling has become automatic, a habit, cemented in your brain by a solid new network of neural pathways.

Armed with this new knowledge Shawn sets out to form a new habit of playing Guitar every day and encounters a humongous failure.

I decided to take up the guitar once again, since I already owned one and knew that I enjoyed playing it. Because common wisdom has long proposed that it takes 21 days to make a habit, I decided to make a spreadsheet with 21 columns, tape it to my wall, and check off each day I played. By the end of the three weeks, I felt confident that (a) I would have a grid full of 21 check marks, (b) daily guitar playing would have become an automatic, established part of my life, (c) my playing would improve, and (d) I would be happier for it.

Three weeks later, I pulled the grid down in disgust. Staring up at four check marks followed by a whole lot of empty boxes was more discouragement and embarrassment than I needed. I had failed my own experiment, and worse, I was no closer to telling potential dates that I was a musician. Worse still, I was shocked, depressed even, at how quick I had been to give up. A positive psychologist should be better at following his own advice!  (Of course, the feelings of failure only deepen when you realize you’re now a depressed positive psychologist.) The guitar was sitting in the closet, a mere 20 seconds away, but I couldn't make myself take it out and play it. What had gone wrong? It turns out that the telling words here are make myself . Without realizing it, I had been fighting the wrong battle one I was bound to lose unless I changed my strategy.

This failure of course leads Shawn to a second realization that we as human beings have limited will power with us.

The point is that whether it’s a strict diet, a New Year ’s resolution, or an attempt at daily guitar practice, the reason so many of us have trouble sustaining change is because we try to rely on willpower. We think we can go from 0 to 60 in an instant,  changing or overturning ingrained life habits through the sheer force of will.

In one of many studies on the subject of willpower, Baumeister and his colleagues invited college students into their lab, instructing them not to eat anything for at least three hours prior to the experiment. Then he split them into three groups.

Group 1 was given a plate of chocolate chip cookies, which they were told not to eat, as well as a healthy plate of radishes which they were welcome to eat to their heart’s content. Group 2 was presented with the same two plates of cookies and radishes, but they were told they could eat off whichever plate they liked. Group 3 was given no food at all. After enduring these situations for a significant length of time, the three groups were then given a set of “simple” geometric puzzles to solve.

Note the quotes around simple. In truth, this was another one of psychology’s favorite tools: the unsolvable puzzle. As I learned the hard way through my Help the Elderly experience, psychology researchers love using impossible games to see how long participants will persevere at a task.

In this case, individuals in Groups 2 and 3 long outlasted those in Group 1, who quickly threw up their hands in defeat. Why? Because the students who had to use every ounce of their willpower to avoid eating the enticing chocolate chip cookies didn't have the willpower or mental energy left to struggle with a complex puzzle—even though avoiding cookies and persisting on a puzzle are seemingly completely unrelated.

The point of these experiments was to show that no matter how unrelated the tasks were, they all seemed to be tapping the same fuel source. As the researchers wrote, “many widely different forms of self-control draw on a common resource, or self-control strength, which is quite limited and hence can be depleted readily.” Put another way, our willpower weakens the more we use it.

Armed with this new knowledge of how we are creatures of habits and  how our will power weakens with time Shawn now decides to reduce the activation energy it takes to start something and experiments with his own mind to see how it reacts:

I thought back to that initial experiment. I had kept my guitar tucked away in the closet, out of sight and out of reach. It wasn’t far out of the way, of course (my apartment isn’t that big), but just those 20 seconds of extra effort it took to walk to the closet and pull out the guitar had proved to be a major deterrent. I had tried to overcome this barrier with willpower, but after only four days, my reserves were completely dried up. If I couldn’t use self-control to ingrain the habit, at least not for an extended period, I now wondered: What i f I could eliminate the amount of activation energy it took to get started?

Clearly, it was time for another experiment. I took the guitar out of the closet, bought a $2 guitar stand, and set it up in the middle of my living room. Nothing had changed except that now instead of being 20 seconds away, the guitar was in immediate reach. Three weeks later, I looked up at a habit grid with 21 proud check marks.

This is a profound discovery for anyone who has ever made a new years resolution and broken it in days. Anyone who has been on a diet regiment or anyone who has ever promised himself that he was going to get more effective starting next week but the next week never came.

The book has pages full of interesting advice on how you can reduce choices that bog you down and how you can make preemptive decisions way  in advance by changing defaults.

Planning on learning how to play an instrument? Just reduce the activation energy by having the instrument handy.

Planning on going to the gym every morning? Sleep in your gym clothes to reduce the activation energy of heading out the next morning.

Planning on quitting television? Take the guitar experiment described above. Flip it by taking the remote batteries out and keeping them in a closet twenty seconds away.

Planning on being more productive at work? Close your mail client and hide it's shortcut inside 4 levels of folders such that it takes you multiple clients to activate it.

The basic premise that Shawn works with is that we are creatures of habits with limited will power. So if you are trying to form a habit don't just rely on your will power. Use your brains creatively to reduce the activation energy to do something and once you do it for sometime it will automatically become a habit forming new neural pathways in your brain that will not even require any will power to keep doing it. So if you're often faced with a blank wall on how to start your day, why not just put the visual studio shortcut on your startup list and have your computer boot to open a project you should be starting your day with?

Once you have done that why not making starting anything else that much more difficult.

Do it long enough and then distractions like Facebook and Twitter would suddenly stop being distractions. They will eventually become tools of forming connections that you use wisely during limiting times and not addictively.

The experiments and the insights that Shawn provided in this book are huge. The real question you need to answer is, how are you going to use these insights in your life to become a better programmer and a better human being.

Go tweak your life and program yourself to pick up some good habits. I wish you good luck.