Breaking Glass by Rishi Dean

Summary: Dan Pink’s “Drive” explores the roots of motivation, and can help in recruiting, retaining, and developing startup teams. E-mail. Tweet.

After my last post on evaluating startup personnel, I was referred to Daniel Pink’s book, Drive. Here, Pink explores the major factors that underlie our motivation, and applies them to the workplace context.

He asserts (with supporting research) that for basic, rudimentary tasks money can work as a motivator; however, when tasks get more complicated, requiring conceptual and creative thinking monetary incentives no longer work. That said, you need to pay people well enough to take the issue of money off the table…or said another way, a fair salary is “table stakes” for a highly functioning team.

Applying this to the startup context, makes enormous sense, as people who join those teams are motivated by something bigger, and their tasks are never “routine”. In Drive, Pink’s findings and suggestions are directly applicable to tangible mechanisms that can be used in a startup, or any other innovation management context.

See the major factors of motivation and the Drive video

I was going through some notes the other day from business school, and came across a presentation that referred to success rates for high-tech companies. The numbers come from the book “High Tech Start Up: The Complete Handbook For Creating Successful New High Tech Companies” by John Nesheim, which is relatively old, but still poignant. In it he offers some numbers that quantify the odds of success for high-tech start-ups – here are the numbers.
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In predicting how your new product idea may take off, you should consider the 1962 work by Everett M. Rogers called Diffusion of Innovations. Rogers also describes the S-shaped growth curve of innovations, and is also known for coining the term “early adopter” – a term familiar to those of you who have read Geoffrey Moore’s famous book, Crossing the Chasm.

Rogers outlines the following seven attributes that determine the rate at which an innovation diffuses in the marketplace. These can serve as a good rule of thumb for forecasting the speed at which a new product or technology will be adopted.
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I wrote an essay back in 2006, after reading John Battelle’s book, The Search, and thought I’d  revist it and take a look at how far we’ve come, and how far we still need to go. All that said, I’m still an idiot for not buying GOOG back in the day…

The unrelenting rise of search (and with it, Google’s share price) as chronicled in John Battelle’s excellent book, The Search, is the topic of much discussion. That said, Search still has a long way to go, and there is plenty of room for improvement, and I think there are real opportunities to unseat Google’s top spot by providing strong offerings in the 3 C’s outlined below.

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