Every programmer goes through a part of his life when he is at the most enthusiastic phase of his career.

You know exactly what I'm talking about. It's the "Of course we will work weekends even if we don't need to" phase. Typically happens in the first two years of their career for most programmers.

This is the time when they impress their bosses, bag promotions, score hikes and sometimes even develop deeper roots.

Then they invariably tend to get tired of trying to impress their managers.

Or they just realize that they have a life.

Or they go through phases in their personal life which start demanding more attention.

I've seen managers change opinions of individuals when this happens.

"She was amazing when she joined but she has totally lost that spark now. She's never going to be as good as she used to be".

When you say you are working with people who are incompetent what you often mean is you are working with highly competent people having bad days and instead of trying to help them you've given up on them.

When you've seen someone peak their career with your own eyes, you know exactly what they are capable of doing.

When you say they are incapable of reaching that peak again, you are not putting a hard limit on their capabilities. You're putting a hard limit on your leadership style instead.

Just a little something to think about.

My YouTube videos on Entity Framework have resulted in more heart warming comments than anything that I have ever done online. Even more than this blog.

For me the videos and the response they received were a solid validation about some things that I've always talked about.

1. Social media (if you must call it that, I hate that term) isn't about broadcasting what you had for lunch or how depressed you are; because at the end of the day nobody cares about you.
2. Social media is about providing serious service to the best of your ability. Service that has the potential of touching someone's life by helping them with a problem, teaching them something, entertaining them or inspiring them.
3. Services that add genuine value aren't produced by someone tweeting about how sad they are. Genuine services that add value are built by slogging at something.
4. Focus on building amazing stuff and stop worrying about your subscribers or audience. If you build it, they will come.

With everyone asking for a part 4 of the video I have gone ahead and uploaded that on you-tube as well.

(The volume on these videos is a little low so you might have to use headphone and crank up your volume to a high level).

Some weeks ago I said that I was going to talk less and ship more. While I continue to strive to do that I wish you just the same. Every tweet, every post, every facebook status update, every you tube video that you publish is your chance to indulge in the act of adding value and ultimately changing the world.

Publish small. Publish consistently. Publish with others in mind. Publish the best of you even when you are publishing for fun. Publish responsibly.

I wish you good luck.

Jason Fried describes usage of small yet powerful products built by 37Signals in Fortune 500 companies.

He explains how 37Signals with it's stack is starting to sneak in on the fortune 500 organizations:

We’ve always been about the Fortune 5,000,000 – the small businesses of the world. The mom and pops, the freelancers, the small shops, and the small businesses with fewer than 10 people are our bread and butter.

However, recently we’ve been seeing more emails and signups from people who work at bigger companies and organizations. Lots of governmental agencies are showing up on our customer radar, too.

So about a week ago we dug into the data and discovered some interesting stats:

Basecamp is being used at…

1. 35 of the Fortune 50
2. 68 of the Fortune 100
3. 321 of the Fortune 500

Highrise is being used at…

1. 23 of the Fortune 50
2. 41 of the Fortune 100
3. 127 of the Fortune 500

Remember, we don’t have any salespeople here, so just about all of these signups are self-service/self-discovery or through word of mouth referrals.

We often hear from folks inside these companies. They’re beyond frustrated with the software/solutions they’re supposed to use. So they turn to our products because they just plain work. Sometimes they expense them, but often it seems a team or department head just pays out of their own pocket. The cost is insignificant compared to the productivity they receive in return.

We salute these insurgents!

While from a 37Signals perspective, the data seems to suggest that they're sneaking into the Fortune 500's, my interpretation of this data is that the fortune 500's are sneaking in on organizations like 37Signals and their products in an attempt to find out more about being effective with less. With companies running out of cash, VC's being super careful about funding, organizations trying to reduce cost and products or projects running out of free money, spending millions of dollars on projects and products is going to continue to get really difficult even for the biggest players out there. If the software industry was a party this far, with the changes in economy, the party is coming to an end. You can see that as a bad thing or a good thing.

Bad because it is going to get increasingly difficult to sell products worth millions. Sales cycles are going to get that much more complex and the fortune 500s are going to be that much more paranoid about spending millions and millions of dollars on your offering.

Good because the tools of guerilla entrepreneurship are out there for anyone who cares to use them. Use them wisely to serve the fortune five million. When these fortune five million flock to you, so will the fortune five hundred.

The take away is simple, build with passion and ethics. Build to serve and add value. Don't worry about the fortune 500 and focus on your craft because if you do it well, they might eventually sneak up on you.

Tribal Leadership By Dave Logan, John King and Halee Fischer-Wright is an insight into some of the best cultures out there and how these cultures are formed over time.

It is also a study of evolution of the mind of a typical tribal leader and the transformation a product or a project into a cause or a calling.

The book breaks any culture into fundamentally five stages:

Stage #1: Undermining: The behavior often seen in street gangs where the members of the team are united by a negative thought (usually, "Life sucks") and are in alienated relationships with everyone outside of the team to an extent where they even see the rest of the world as opposition or competition. Inter team competition for power also exists within the team.

Stage #2: Apathetic Victim: After outgrowing stage one, the team starts seeing that life in general does not suck. The focus in this stage slowly moves from "Life sucks" to "my life sucks" resulting in a realization that things can be improved with time and effort. People in this stage often continue to see their own team and the world as competition.

Stage #3: Usually happens when a person fights the phase of getting bullied by his boss and masters a skill thereby becoming productive. In this stage as the person becomes effective he shifts from "my life sucks" to "I'm great (and they are not)" approach of thinking. If you find yourself taking credit for your teams work or bossing people around, or even "pushing" or bullying them to get more work done out of them you are in this stage. If you find yourself criticizing your team members you are in this stage. You are still competing with people in your team and see them as a threat to your progress and growth.

Stage #4: Is a stage of Tribal Pride and happens when you've played the stage 3 game for a long time, have won and have had a series of epiphanies which have given you the realization that stage three doesn't scale. You've also realized that the unrelenting quest of power and competition is holding you back from making a larger impact or spreading your cause. In this stage your focus slowly shifts from "I'm great" to "we're great". Your teams are self sufficient and information is flowing smoothly within your team. You are no longer competing with your own team and have moved to competing with other organizations.

Stage #5: Is a point of time in your life where you finally get over the concept of competing with others and bump into innocent wonderment. When a medicine company stops competing with other medicine companies and starts competing with diseases. A stage where the entire company is driven by a cause that is larger than life. In this stage your focus slowly shits from "we're great" to "life is great!". You work because you experience the wonderment of a baby.

The division of organizations today more or less looks like this:

What the book does not explicitly state but makes very evident if you read between the lines is that all of your work life is a journey from "life sucks" to "life is great". What is rather tragic if you notice the graph above, is that most organizations and leaders are stuck in the "I'm great" stage. Only about 2% of the organizations and individuals manage to experience true wonderment of a toddler or a baby.

The biggest barrier to reaching wonderment is getting stuck at stage 3 where you are constantly busy portraying how amazing you are. Managers controlling who sends out emails and to whom, leaders hording information because they believe information is power, team leads constantly criticizing their own teams and teams constantly stepping on each others toes for their next promotion.

Stage 3 is important because it makes your stronger, but once you have lived it, your goal should be to grow out of it and move on to stage 4 and eventually to stage 5 where you experience true wonderment in work. A stage where are making a dent in your universe and the universe of people around you.

Which stage of leadership do you stand in?

Before you answer that question however, keep in mind that one of the most prominent features of stage 3 leaders is that they think of themselves as being on stage 4.

Go get the book (or download the free Audio book) and do yourself a favor by reading it. You might find yourself nodding your head in approval. You might even find yourself thinking about the times when you were fighting for growth and power. You might find yourself reflecting on how stupid you were. That or you might have to stand face to face with your deepest insecurities and admit you are a level 3 leader. Either ways, it is time for some serious soul searching if you want to eventually want to live the life of honest wonderment.

The book, Delivering Happiness by Zappos CEO, Tony Shieh is moving on more fronts than one for anyone who has ever tried to work on building a team, a product, a business or an organization. The book is an insight into Tony's mind and his core values which continue to drive Zappos towards success.

But what is even more fascinating about the book is the openness with which it addresses and describes the fears of the early entrepreneurs or anyone who has ever tried to walk a different path.

Tony tells the tale of his quitting Oracle to chase a dream of starting his own organization. The story is fascinating because it provides a chilling account of the brutal reality of walking a different path and at the same time reassuring because of the way it ends. Tony tells the story with a remarkable blend of facts and emotions:

As it turned out, the adventure we were waiting for to happen to us didn't end up happening on its own. We ended up sitting around in our apartment, occasionally doing some Web design work, and going out every once in a while to try to drum up some more sales.

By the end of the first week, it dawned on me that neither of us was actually passionate about doing Web design work. We loved  the idea of owning and running our own business, but the reality ended up being a lot less fun than the fantasy.

My parents were not exactly thrilled that I’d quit my job at Oracle without a real plan for what to do next. When I told my dad that Sanjay and I were planning on running a Web design business, he told me that it didn’t really sound like that could ever become a big-enough business to be meaningful.  And now, one week into it, both Sanjay and I were starting to wonder if we’d made the right decision to leave Oracle. The next few weeks were tough and somewhat depressing. We started to spend most of our time just surfing the Web to combat the boredom and to keep ourselves entertained.

Watching Sanjay go into the coat closet to nap there in the middle of the day was only sort of funny the first time. We were starting to get a bit stir-crazy.

Luckily, we both had enough savings from the jobs we had in college that we didn’t need to worry about whether we would be able to pay the rent for the rest of the year. We didn’t know what we wanted to do, but we had learned what we didn’t want to do. We didn’t want to work for Oracle. We didn’t want to do any more Web design work. We didn’t want to make any more sales calls. And we didn’t want to be bored out of our minds. So we spent our days and nights trying to figure out the next great Internet business idea, but we really couldn’t come up with anything that sounded good.

One weekend, out of sheer boredom, we decided to do some computer programming to test out an idea for something we initially called the Internet Link Exchange (ILE), which we eventually renamed to just LinkExchange.

What Tony and Sanjay had stumbled upon out of sheer boredom, would later be acquired by Microsoft for 265 million dollars. On one hand the book describes the Zappos values and culture and on the other it also has stories which form  a constant roller costar ride of up's and down's in Tony's life where on multiple occasions Zappos was inches away from getting wound down because of lack of finances. From overcoming his fears of failure to selling his assets to keep Zappos afloat, the book is not just an insight into Tony's mind but and insight into why entrepreneurs and developers build organizations and products.

More often than not, artists and builders don't work on building stuff just for the profits associated with building stuff. They build stuff because they have an unstoppable itch that they have to scratch. The itch of delivering happiness.

The television teaches you stereotypes of fun. The television teaches you that entertainment is junk that gets thrown at you by media companies which you learn how to enjoy over time.

Television teaches you to pick from a couple of hundred channels and then just hope that your channel is playing something you are truly interested in. If not, television teaches you to settle for what you get.

Television is junk food for your mind.

Television is about learning to enjoy wandering generality instead aiming for of a meaningful specific.

Go on. Keep the batteries just twenty seconds away from immediate reach and tweak your brain to seek other constructive meaningful forms of entertainment.

Why?

Because Television, quiet literally, is one of the biggest metaphors out there today that actually represents "the box" and your job is to think outside it.

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.