"Though I'm passed one hundred thousand miles, I'm feeling very still
And I think my spaceship knows which way to go,"
- David Bowie
Business plan - check.
Moat in business plan - check.
Fundraising rolodex - check.
Personal cash cusion - check.
All systems go for escape orbit on September 17.
So long, and thanks for all the fish!
23 August, 2007
Lift-off
Another review come and gone yesterday.
(Exceeded.)
One tidbit that I did discover this go-through was that the shiny, happy compensation target numbers on http://hrweb are figments of policy imagination.
While it is theoretically possible to hit the high end of the range, in actual practice, it doesn't happen. The best way to describe it is that the theoretical high end is the volume of a bucket. Then, the budgeted amount of cash for the year's reviews gets poured into the bucket and the surface of the water is the real high end.
Net result?
Bait and switch.
I'd rather have more realistic numbers to aim for that I know I have a chance of being rewarded with instead of numbers that are impossible to achieve. Now that I know the top end just doesn't exist, what's the point of aiming high?
"It's not that I'm lazy, it's that I just don't care. It's a problem of motivation, all right? Now if I work my ass off and Initech ships a few extra units, I don't see another dime; so where's the motivation? And here's something else, Bob: I have eight different bosses right now. "
(Exceeded.)
One tidbit that I did discover this go-through was that the shiny, happy compensation target numbers on http://hrweb are figments of policy imagination.
While it is theoretically possible to hit the high end of the range, in actual practice, it doesn't happen. The best way to describe it is that the theoretical high end is the volume of a bucket. Then, the budgeted amount of cash for the year's reviews gets poured into the bucket and the surface of the water is the real high end.
Net result?
Bait and switch.
I'd rather have more realistic numbers to aim for that I know I have a chance of being rewarded with instead of numbers that are impossible to achieve. Now that I know the top end just doesn't exist, what's the point of aiming high?
"It's not that I'm lazy, it's that I just don't care. It's a problem of motivation, all right? Now if I work my ass off and Initech ships a few extra units, I don't see another dime; so where's the motivation? And here's something else, Bob: I have eight different bosses right now. "
Preparing for Take-off
Make sure your whole company feels like one team. Ballmer once joked at a company meeting, “Why do the different groups only clap for themselves?” - http://blog.redfin.com/blog/2007/08/will_work_for_food_why_i_left_microsoft_for_a_startup_.html
Word.
Word.
04 August, 2007
Can We Hire Them to Study Microsoft?
Bad bosses get promoted, not punished?
In [a] study to be presented at a conference on management this weekend, almost two-thirds of the 240 participants in an online survey said the local workplace tyrant was either never censured or was promoted for domineering ways.
"The fact that 64.2 percent of the respondents indicated that either nothing at all or something positive happened to the bad leader is rather remarkable -- remarkably disturbing," wrote the study's authors, Anthony Don Erickson, Ben Shaw and Zha Agabe of Bond University in Australia.
They faulted senior managers for not recognizing the signs of workplace strife wrought by bad bosses. "The leaders above them who did nothing, who rewarded and promoted bad leaders ... represent an additional problem."
Hmmmmmm...........
And in the same vein:
Conformity, flattery, and favors, more than competence, make for influence in world of corporate boards, study finds
But we already intuitively know these things since we work at Microsoft, don't we?
I reiterate my second request of management at Microsoft to thin the management ranks of the non-performers and flatten the organizational hierarchy. I keep hearing how we're a data-driven company but I keep seeing blind mice when when it comes to organizational and management effectiveness data that MS Poll generates.
In [a] study to be presented at a conference on management this weekend, almost two-thirds of the 240 participants in an online survey said the local workplace tyrant was either never censured or was promoted for domineering ways.
"The fact that 64.2 percent of the respondents indicated that either nothing at all or something positive happened to the bad leader is rather remarkable -- remarkably disturbing," wrote the study's authors, Anthony Don Erickson, Ben Shaw and Zha Agabe of Bond University in Australia.
They faulted senior managers for not recognizing the signs of workplace strife wrought by bad bosses. "The leaders above them who did nothing, who rewarded and promoted bad leaders ... represent an additional problem."
Hmmmmmm...........
And in the same vein:
Conformity, flattery, and favors, more than competence, make for influence in world of corporate boards, study finds
But we already intuitively know these things since we work at Microsoft, don't we?
I reiterate my second request of management at Microsoft to thin the management ranks of the non-performers and flatten the organizational hierarchy. I keep hearing how we're a data-driven company but I keep seeing blind mice when when it comes to organizational and management effectiveness data that MS Poll generates.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)