What to change?

Read here.

I am wondering why so many of our officials and some of the vendors in our chess circle would rather face villification and criticism time and time again instead of improving and getting praise, trust and respect. It then occurred to me that maybe they have no idea of what to change. We have been immersed in that old culture of mediocrity for so long that they dont know any better. I hope that is the case because then this example may help. Afterall if we are to change we need to know what we are going to change into. So please allow me to share a little from my company emasters to see if it may be helpful.

Brief History

The company was formed on a Vision. A Vision that we will be paid for services based on the market value of our skill sets and not based on where we are from. At the onset we had a few challenges. We design soft intellectual products. That means that once we deliver our product it is gone in the sense we cannot take back a design. An internet company where our clients are primarily Americans. So our standards had to be world class and we also had to collect the money upfront as we cannot afford to chase after bad debt. This went against market norm as usually in design the clients pays after they have seen the designs. I hope this shows that nothing is impossible if we apply ourselves.

Some lessons in partnering

When we first started out we established some demonstrable marketing skill. We became the top 100,000 most visited site on the WWW. And we won some online International design competitions for designing business sites. But we needed more backend support to be commercially viable. We found our first partner from Australia who was technically strong and we worked together to improve our questionaires and improve our technical knowledge in order to put good products into the market. The key principle is win win. Each doing what they do best. But there also had to be trust as we could of course have taken the knowledge and not worked with them. And it proved a winning decision. Besides the obvious complimentary skills between us the underlying skill is judgement, learning who we can trust. How to share, give and take and how to communicate.

As the business grew we brought in more technical partners and we soon reached the stage where we needed our technical people to talk directly with the clients technical people to be more effective and efficient. Let me share our observations as we are copied on the communication. When there is a problem, we found no finger pointing. The problem is quickly identified and each fixed the parts they were responsible for. Professional conduct. Mutual respect.

I hope we can learn from this. No dramas. Shit happens. Hard work is not a problem. In fact it can be fun. It's the drama that is draining. It's all the finger pointing, excuses, denial that saps us of our energy. Totally unproductive and racks up costs. We can be like that too if we can change our attitudes. A good spin off to choosing good partners is that you are not wasting time unnecesarily, doing good work with happy clients and partners and still find the time to start your own blog like this.

Also read this. Here.