One of my favorite Silicon Valley CEOs, Gary Read, is in the process of launching his new company. After reading his great blog, I had the pleasure of learning how a true leader plans out a vision for his new company.
When I wrote a business plan for my company many years ago, I spent months preparing, researching, and planning it out. When my 175-page business plan was complete, I met with my mentor and he white-boarded my entire business in a matter of 20 minutes. Today, my company still maps to that white-board scenario and I have never glanced at my big thick business plan.
I’m inspired with a refreshing perspective from 37 signals in writing Rework – a smart book about efficiency and productivity in today’s work world. Their perspective is that long-term planning is a “fantasy,” and they suggest that instead of calling it “planning” we call it “guessing.”
In reviewing Gary’s “plans” for launching his company, he places more thought on birthing a work culture and setting up the infrastructure than just coming up with what products/services they will provide. For example, he writes:
We’re planning to make a lot of use of collaboration solutions: probably use Google Apps for email, groups, IM, maybe even video conf. We will probably use something like basecamp and then use Skype for calling and maybe video as well. Meet.Me is great for adhoc screen sharing
One thing that I want to achieve in the new company is to substantially reduce email traffic internally. Already we are hunting to find things and have different docs at different versions etc. because email is a horrible medium.
Instead, we are going to birth a culture of using discussion groups/internal social for most things that would otherwise be email. I’d like us to all keep an EMPTY email inbox and not have folders . . . instead everything is stored in the discussion groups.
Gary makes another mention to include iPad in the mix. He must realize that the growth of mobile technology is huge, and by 2014 it’s expected that mobile will overtake the PC. IDC has estimated that the mobile workforce will exceed 1 billion people in 2011.
All this spells EFFICIENCY, with special attention to the new ways people work. I’m assuming Gary will build out an inside sales organization and he won’t just hire phone jocks pounding the phones. He will take the time to invest in tools first to and then hire teams to work with those tools. These might include:
Sales Productivity/Communication Tools- Phone, Email, Text, IM, Skype, GoogleApps, iPad, CRM, Calendar, Dialers, Video, VM+EM Scripts/Templates, Presentation/Slide Sharing, Closing, Quoting
Sales Intelligence Tools- Wikipedia, Hoovers, InsideView, OneSource, Discover.org, PeopleMaps, Data.com, Trigger& Alerts, ROI Calculators
Social Tools- LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Blogs, Slideshare, YouTube
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