Start-up culture and all that Jazz

I had an opportunity to explain start-up culture to a friend tonight.  And being one to never shy away from an analogy…

Joining a start-up is like joining a jazz trio for daily jam sessions.

(Image Credit – Fixed Image via Flickr)

So what’s a jazz jam session like?  I think of a bunch of deeply talented folks, each with their area of expertise, brought together in a room, playing off the energy of the community there and riffing off of each other.  They know their instruments well and often come to the table with years of jazz experience.  They improv and go with the flow.  The pace is snappy but confident.  There is potentially no rehearsal time.  Perfection is not the name of the game but instead, creating something cool together.  It’s about enjoying the time together and enjoying the imperfections that surface as signs of character.  I explain start-up culture like this because it’s often hard to convey to someone who’s not familiar with it.

If you come from a large enterprise culture then you might be more familiar with another musical style, more like a symphony orchestra.  Symphony orchestras are larger with many experts as well.  These experts practice and plan a lot because the idea of the symphony is playing in perfect sync, no mistakes, no improvising.  The beauty of a perfectly orchestrated symphony is simply music to our ears.  Symphony orchestras produce some amazing music, like jazz trios, but the processes to produce the music and the results are very, very different.

Let’s say you are joining a jazz trio (aka start-up) as a drummer or sax player.  The other jazz players generally don’t practice ahead for their nightly sessions.  They “be” the music and would look for the drummer to immediately pick up on this and just go with the flow.  Over the following week the new drummer would focus on fitting into the groove, the pace and the style of the existing players.  He or she may also start introducing new flavors of drumming to add their own feel and help the group grow in a new way.  Learning happens through doing and the doing starts day one because the group needs a drummer. If you were used to playing the drums in a symphony orchestra then this approach could completely throw you at first.

So imagine joining a symphony orchestra as the drum player instead.  You would practice lots in advance to get up to speed, perhaps getting recordings of the orchestra to play (plan out) on your own first.  You would also have lots of sheet music to go on for practicing.  Before you performed in front of the audience (community) you would invest a lot in planning/practice time, until you felt you met the requirements.

Both have require processes.  Both attract different types of musicians.  Some folks successfully cross over.  Some folks discover to their pleasure that they’ve been trapped in one style and when they try the other process/style they feel like they’ve truly come home.

So what type are you more aligned with?  Does the analogy work for you?

November 16th, 2009 - Posted in social media | | 8 Comments

You can’t reach a kid on a CB Radio

Yeah, sounds silly that I would even say this doesn’t it?  But a million times a day older generations continue to try to communicate with younger generations on channels they feel comfortable with and wonder why they don’t get a response in a timely manner, if ever.  Let’s take a look at some recent channel shifts in the past couple of decades:

• Teletype messages to Fax messages
• Fax messages to email messages
• Phone messages (on paper) to Voicemail
• Email messages to IM
• IM to IM within Facebook or Gmail
• Phone calls to Cell Phone calls
• Cell phone calls to Text Messaging
• Text Messaging to Twitter
• Letters to Emails
• Emails to Status updates
• In person communications to Online communications
• In person friendships to Online friendships
• Real-time communications to non-real-time communications
• One week response time to Same Day response time
• Same Day response time to Instant Response Time
• Respond during work hours to respond 24-7

If you are part of the GenX generation like me think of your grandmother and look at this list.  Chances are most grandmothers are still writing letters, prefer in-person visits and get togethers and have somewhat embraced the phone for special occasions.  They are stuck in the 50’s-60’s and darn happy to stay there. Your parents would be the influencers to drive them to embrace new communications channels.  Chances are they are definitely not interested in any of the stuff you use or your kids use.

Look at your parents and this list.  Chances are they are they have a cell phone for safety reasons only, have email (finally), like weekly phone calls at least for news about your life, like to have visits once and awhile, and have a fax machine at home if they run a small business.  They are happy to be in the late 80’s to mid 90’s.  We were the ones who got them set up on a computer, email, and probably even Facebook (so they could see what’s up with the grandkids.)  We probably even got them a cell phone.  We drove their new channel adoption.

How about you and your spouse?  I’m sure you are starting to see the trend.  Each younger generation tries to get their previous generation to adopt some of the channels they use.  Extrapolate that to each generation away from you and the number of channels you have to communicate on diminishes.  And with each restriction on channels the younger generation spends less time communicating with the older generations.  And with this lack of communication the older generation gets frustrated and wonders why the younger generation “never calls or writes”.  Ah, you know the drill.

So what to do about it.  Well, I think the first thing is embracing this fact and getting it out in the open.  Landing on communications channels that work requires regular, you guessed it, communications but on channel selection.

I know that if I want to reach the kids I need to embrace texting and Facebook.  Forget the phone, voicemail, email, in-person communications, etc…  Yes, it’s possible to reach them on the older channels but if you want instant response and regular communications you better adopt it.  Think about it, don’t you wish you parents checked emails hourly?

At the same time it’s not just a one way street either where the older generations must adapt or whither.  The younger generations must explain the options available to reach them and leave in a few of the familiar ones.  And they should explain the priority and urgency settings on each one of those channels.  Send me a letter and give me no phone number or email in it communicate back to you on then don’t expect a reply any time soon.

And lastly the younger generation needs to explain that mixed channel communications is also preferred as a alternative.  Both generations can express themselves in the channel they feel comfortable in but they need to provide alternative channel options for replies and be cool getting responses that way.  Yeah, it’s not what either party wants but it keeps things at least moving and it’s better than no communications at all.

What other advice would you give for bridging the channel divide?

November 14th, 2009 - Posted in social media | | 3 Comments