MindValley Blog

I was asked this question yesterday in a team meeting where I shared three critical factors of entrepreneurial success that Brian Tracy shared with me at a seminar. 

His answer to why most entrepreneurs fail was: They give up

It is as simple as that.  The successful ones just NEVER stop!  They have a pigheaded determination to achieve the goal they set out to achieve. 

Brian Tracy shared a really powerful analogy with everyone at Jay Abraham’s seminar.  What he said is that entrepreneurship is similar to flying.

a) You need a destination - where do you want to go?
b) You need to take off - just get started and take action!
c) You constantly need to adjust course

Did you know that a plan is always off course?  99% of the time it is making constant adjustments to ensure that it gets to the desired destination. 

Entrepreneurship is not that different.  The problem is that that most people don’t have the stomach for the constant ups and downs.  It is an emotional roller-coaster!

This is how most entrepreneurs view things:

In order to get from A to B, most entrepreneurs will say that they experience a constant series of ups and downs. 

It is a never ending struggle and somewhere along the way most entrepreneurs drop out of the race.  They simply give up, pack up, and go home.

However, the successful ones just keep on going.  What helps them along the way? They view the world differently.

Here is how successful entrepreneurs view things:

Successful entrepreneurs think of climbing a new mountain and to climb a mountain you hardly ever choose a straight path. 

Instead, you have to feel out the terrain and constantly make little adjustments.  One second you are moving towards the left and the next you make a small adjustment and continue towards the right.  But you are constantly moving forward, learning, and getting closer to the top. 

So, the “ups and downs” have become course corrections.  There are no “downs” in the eyes of successful entrepreneurs.  These are simply learning opportunities on an exciting journey towards the top.

I just finished reading the book “Presence” and I can already tell that it will have a profound and lasting impact on the way I think.

The book is very profound and it will take months, possibly years to fully digest but it is one of the single most important books that I have read in a long time because it addresses some of the biggest challenges facing all of us and it really expanded my understanding of what we are up against and what is required to change the world for the better. 

Some key learnings that I took away:

1) The world and science is too fragmented and we must learn to think of the entire systems and “the whole.” 
2) We must focus on the fundamental problems and stop “shifting the burden” and stop applying quick fixes.
3) Creative breakthroughs and deeper understandings can easier emerge when we learn to quiet the mind (meditate) and lead from the heart
4) We must continue to develop our awareness of the problems that we face and make the right choices as individuals

The last point also reminds me of a conversation that I had with a friend over lunch last week.  Why do so many ’smart’ and educated people continue to fail to make the right decisions that would be in the best interest?

Examples:
* How many educated people don’t recycle?
* How many educated people continue eating junk food even though they would never fill up their car with junk fuel?
* How many educated people keep driving SUVs even while global warming is a real problem facing all of us?

It is not for a lack of awareness that educated people continue to do all of the above…

WorldBlu is a wonderful organization with a fantastic mission.

Their goal is to help make organizations more democratic.  The instant I learned about this organization I was deeply moved by their vision.

I was also determined to have MindValley enter the contest for the world’s most democratic work place.

They have a scorecard to measure what this really means.

Just going through the process is already helping me learn and grow as a leader and fortunately we have already come pretty far. 

Here are the WorldBlu Principles of Organizational Democracy:

1) Purpose and Vision

Score: Great!

MindValley has come A LONG way in the past couple of years and I am happy and excited to say that we have never had a clearer vision of who we aspire to be and where we aspire to go.  I will write a separate post on this in the future with more detail but our sense of purpose has never been stronger!  Will keep reinforcing and overcommunicating our vision going forward.

2) Transparency

Score: Very Good!

We like to run MindValley like an open book.  Our wiki makes all goals and processes at the company very transparent and we love to share the financial results that we are achieving across all of our projects!  As soon as I get caught up on accounting, we will also continue with the monthly updates where we share all of the nitty gritty details of our overall financial health.

3) Dialogue & Listening

Score: World-class

All of you should know me by now well enough that I always do everything I can to create an open work environment where everyones opinion counts.  We take extreme care in listening to feedback and treat everyone as equal thought partners in the projects and tasks that you are working on.  Can we do better?  You bet!  I have to say this because I believe in continuous improvement and we have just gotten started.  :-)

4) Fairness & Dignity

Score: Great!

I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to me to treat everyone with respect, to be fair, open and honest.  As a leader, everyone will have to make tough and at some points painful and unpopular decisions.  However, I will always be fair and treat everyone how I would like to be treated if I were in your shoes.   That much I can promise. 

5) Accountability

Score: Solid (huge improvement over the past 3 months)

I must admit that this was one of our weaknesses until recently but with lots of process improvements (scrumming away) we have made huge progress.  At times things are still not “world-class” but for an organization that has doubled in size since July, I think we have come a long way and I am very proud of the accomplishments of the team.  Having clear lines of accountability seems to be liberating to the entire organization.  At least that’s how I feel.

6) Individual & Collective

Score: Admirable

I must say I was overjoyed when I saw our project leaders, Meike and Katalina, reach out to the entire team and thank every person that has helped them to accomplish so much over the past month!  It is great that we can celebrate both individuals and team effort!

7) Choice

Score: Very good

We do our utmost to give people choice!  So much in fact that the entire organization is shaping and taking on new projects that have been pushed and promoted from the bottom up because these were projects that some of our employees felt strongly enough that we had to pursue. 

8) Integrity

Score: Solid

Integrity has no shades of gray.  Either you follow strict ethics and morals or you don’t!  While I love joking and kidding around, at the end of the day integrity is probably the single most important value to me that I made part of my life during years of martial arts training.  I love to empower everyone on our team and hand over great responsibility but everyone has to understand that freedom requires discipline, and strict morals and ethics.

9) Decentralization

Score: Too much!  :-)

Hehe… these days it is hard to keep up with all the projects that everyone is independently pushing and pursuing.  Loving it! 

10) Reflection & Evaluation

Score: Getting better and better

Wow, for the first time in a long time I feel that I will be able to slow down to speed up.  A lot of it is thanks to Nicole, our latest all start task master that just joined MindValley.  Nicole is our new jack of all trades and has taken over accounting, HR, payroll, financial reporting, office admin and lots of other tasks that used to tie me up.  What a liberating experience! 

Hmm… reflecting on this post some more… I should really ask everyone on our team to evaluate us along the above dimensions.  Hopefully the results won’t be that different but it will surely help shed some additional light on where we need to keep focusing to further continue improving our organization.

The above list comes directly from the WorldBlu site at:
http://worldblu.com/orgdemo/principles.php

Just seven days ago we launched our first internal wiki!

Yeah!  I am very excited because this is truly the next step in the evolution of the company.  The wiki is going to be a lot of fun and will become a huge asset for MindValley.  We have BIG plans to “wikify” all of our processes and to dramatically increase knowledge sharing inside MindValley.  In other words, MindValley now has a big shared  brain.

The other interesting thing about the wiki is that it was initially proposed and pushed forward from the bottom up just like Business Week had predicted:

“Wikis, blogs, and other tools will arrive in the workplace whether companies are ready or not, as younger employees tend to develop their own self-organized networks (learn more)

Well, I guess Business Week got that story right! 

Overall, I am very excited about the wiki because it will greatly help in making the organization run much smoother.  What I also love about the wiki model is that it is so organic.  Everyone is a contributor and if anyone has any ideas to make things better they don’t need to ask, they can directly take action and implement them. 

I have read countless business books and articles on getting things done over the years and once in a while I come agross a new gem, a new insight that just hits me like a rock. 

As I was listening to some lessons from Bill Bartmann, one of the most successful serial entrepreneurs I have ever met, I had one of these moments.  What Bill had to say might be common sense but the insights are so profound they have changed the way I work and think about work ever since. 

Here is what Bill had to share:

To achieve extraordinary results, you must stop doing ordinary things.  

Why do I like this quote so much?

Because I have noticed that it is very easy to just “get busy.”  I can think of many occassions where I just “got busy.”  However, instead of making a list of tasks to do and asking myself which tasks are “extraordinary” I would be “too busy” to ask myself these hard questions and just plow ahead.  Well, it turns out that one never runs out of work.  Anyone can always find more things that have to get done.  So, the key truly is to focus on the stuff that matters, the extraordinary things that can help one to become extraordinarily successful. 

How do you know if what you are working on the right tasks?  Just ask yourself:

“Will doing this help me achieve extraordinary results?” OR

“If I keep doing this day in and day out will it help me achieve extraordinary results?”

If the answer is no, then find the items that will truly help you get to the vision that you have set out to achieve.  Now, this does not mean that one no longer has to do the little grunt work.  However, everday it is worth identifying 3-4 items that can really help move the business or project forward and making enough time to work on those. 

You may have heard the saying…

“It can get lonely at the top.”

When I first started MindValley, I was not quite sure what to make of this saying but after having run a company for a few years, I now completely know what it is all about…

As a leader, it might be difficult to create an open work culture where employees are comfortable and completely at ease to voice their own opinion, especially if they have ideas that go against what the leader is pushing for.

Worse, if one is not careful, very soon, a leader can find him or herself surrounded by “yes men” that are too scared to contradict or question the ideas put forward by the leader.

Equally important, when a company is rapidly growing some items are bound to fall through the cracks.  This is not due to a lack of caring.  As a founder, you will  frequently find yourself juggling dozens of “urgent and important” items.  While focusing on the top priorities every day and every week is important, the founder will

1. Not always realize everything that is important and
2. Might not focus on what other people on his team would consider important. 

What I like to tell my teammates frequently is that “I have no crystall ball.” I don’t assume I know everything there is to know. 

So, if there are things that are ”not working for you,” I expect everyone to speak up!  I frequently mention this because I cannot over-emphasize the importance of having an open work culture. 

I am lucky enough to work with so many bright members that by discovering what is “not working” for them I can rapidly help to prioritize what it is that I need to focus on to help make MindValley more successful and to create a far more exciting and fun work culture. 

Creating this environment is no easy task. 

While I keep stressing the importance of open, honest, upward feedback, this is not easy for everyone to do.  Some people are just less comfortable to “critique” their boss.

Trust, me, we can take it and we want any and all feedback that will help make us more successful and will make work easier and more fun for everyone. 

If there are things that are “not working for you,” then the MindValley Way is to bring them up.  I am not a mind reader, I have no crystal ball, and I am not as smart as the rest of you so I look forward to hearing all of your constructive feedback on how to keep making things better and better. 

Over the coming weeks, I will be blogging a lot about “The MindValley Way” to help further build and cement MindValley’s culture. I am a firm believer that having a well defined culture will contribute greatly to:

• attracting and retaining the best employees
•  make work at MindValley far more enjoyable
•  help to take MindValley to the next level

At the core of ”The MindValley Way”, we expect ourselves to take ownership & initiative. 

What exactly does that mean?

At MindValley, everybody is given a lot of responsibility and freedom to get their job done.  We often let employees that have just started with us run some of our biggest money making websites or start to lead important new projects.  At the same time, we do not micro-manage.  Why?  First of all, I believe that great people manage themselves and don’t need to be micro-managed, they need to be coached and guided.  Secondly.  we have a flat organization and for a 15 people company, we are doing A LOT so there is no time to micro-manage anyone. 

However, that also means that every employee needs to take full ownership and take initiative.  Specifically, we expect that every employee should come up with their own action items of things that they should be doing to help move their project and the company forward.  Instead of waiting to be told what to do and what is next, we expect that everyone comes up with recommendations and proposed action items on how to best keep moving forward and achieve the targets that have been mutually agreed on. 

What have been the results of this so far?

Go getters tend to thrive.  They just grab the ball and run with it.  I believe it is better to execute and if someone makes a mistake they ask for forgiveness later.  At the same time, I have noticed that average people struggle with our culture.  That is because average people do not like to take initiative.  They do not like to think on their own two feet and they prefer to be spoon fed and told exactly what to do.  Well, we do not want average people.  We want great people and we are committed to creating a culture that is geared to see great people thrive and will hopefully quickly weed out the average people. 

I have also noticed that it is very important to keep communicating that this is part of our core DNA because when people first join they might find that sometimes they have an “empty to do list” and instead of sitting idle and waiting for what is next, we need to explain to them that often they are also expected to start thinking of what should be next to achieve the goals for the projects that they have been assigned to.  Having said that… that rarely happens since there is always a lot that needs to get done but we do want everyone to come up with lots of additional ideas and suggestions to take things to the next level.  :-) 

Joel created “The Joel Test,” which is way to measure of how good a software team is. The test is simple. Just answer yes or no to a set of 12 questions. According to Joel, if you do not score close to 12, then you have a lot of work left to do.

So, obviously we wanted to put MindValley to the test and before we share the detailed score with you, I will need to point out some important points regarding “The Joel Test.”

First, “The Joel Test” is about software development and a web development environment is a little bit different and so some of the points need to be tweaked.

Second, here at MindValley, we follow an agile development process. As we go through the Joel Test, you will see that it is a great starting point for a good web development environment but it is just a starting point if you want to have a truly agile development process. In other words, the Joel Test just scratches the surface to determine if a work environment is sufficient for agile development.

The Joel Test - Test Results

1. Do you use source control? YES (1)

Of course. Anyone not using source control must be insane. It is a must in any web development environment. Our weapon of choice is SVN.

2. Can you make a build in one step? YES (1)

Yes. We mostly use PHP and Ruby on Rails. To speed things up, we also have an “auto-update script” to automatically push all of the latest code that was submitted live to site in one click.

3. Do you make daily builds? YES (1)

Daily builds are too infrequent. Agile teams should commit code at least several times per day. Our report-fix-retest loop is also really tight. When / where applicable, we use unit testing to ensure everything works bug free.

4. Do you have a bug database? YES (1)

Yes, even agile teams have bugs.

Every bug is reported with:

• steps to reproduce the bug
• expected behavior
• observed (buggy) behavior
• who it’s assigned to
• whether or not its been fixed

5. Do you fix bugs before writing new code? It Depends (1)

We believe in delivering bug free web applications. However, what we work on depends on what the key priorities are at the moment.

6. Do you have an up-to-date schedule? YES (1)

We follow the scrum agile development process and everything is broken out clearly into each sprint backlog. Not only that, we even developed our own productivity / scrum application to help us get things done faster. This is called “The MindValley Way”

7. Do you have a spec? YES (1)

Since we use Scrum, our spec is the current Sprint Backlogs along with the overall Product Backlog. However, agile development also means that specs are often moving targets and get refined and tweaked over time.

8. Do programmers have quiet working conditions? YES (0.5)

If you mean do they work in cubicles the answer is no and we are proud of it. We do not believe in cubicles! Having an open and collaborative work environment is far more engaging and creates a far more energetic and vibrant work environment and culture.

We do everything in teams and there is a huge advantage in having groups of 2-3 developers sit next to each other. It dramatically accelerates knowledge sharing.

Having said that, our office is generally very quiet.

9. Do you use the best tools money can buy? YES (0.5)

Recent examples:

1) We just upgraded the monitors to 22″ inch flat screens for everyone in the office.

2) We just pgraded our Internet to make it even faster and more reliable.

I believe in always asking our developers what tools / resources could help them boost their productivity and quality of their work environment.

As a bonus, we also have free snacks and drinks in the office to keep everyone well nourished. :-)

However, we do take pride in always having been a very profitable company and will not buy the latest and greatest toys if there is no business need that justifies the expense.

10) Do you have testers? YES (1)

Since we believe in agile development and unit testing, we do not need many manual testers. We develop many small web apps where the developers take full ownership of the product, which means that they are also responsible for testing and ensuring that everything works well.

11) Do new candidates write code during their interview? YES (1)

A coding test is part of the interviewing process and depending n the quality of the results of the initial test we may ask for even more sample work.

12) Do you do hallway usability testing? YES (1)

This is easy because we have lots of people in the office that are ot working intimiately on the project and so it is easy to just ask hem to take a look and see how they use / interact with the tools e are developing.

We also believe these questions are extremely important:

Are programmers given specs or part of determining the future look and feel and functionality of the application?

At MindValley, every person that is part of a project is expected to contribute their ideas and suggestions on how to keep improving the applications we are developing. We do not believe in spoon serving “specs” to a team of developers. On the contrary, we pride ourselves on assembling very diverse teams (we have people from over 8 countries at MindValley) and get everyone to work closely together to help us develop breakthrough applications.

I hope the above information gave you a little better glimpse into the development environment that we are creating at MindValley.

Over the past couple of weeks, I have received several good questions from potential recruits and I just wanted to take the time to address these questions.

Here is a set of new questions that we just received from a very promising Ruby developer in Singapore.

1. Are all of you working in KL? If so, how did you all end up at MindValley?

Yes, all of us are working at our KL office. We are probably one of the most diverse small companies around. At one point, we had over 10 nationalities in our team of 15 people. At this point we have people from Belgium, Canada, Finland, Germany, Indonesia, Poland, The United States, and of course Malaysia in our office.

How did we end up here? Great question.

Vishen and I first met in the US in 1995 and we always wanted to start a company together. About 4 years ago we decided to give it a go.

We started MindValley in the US. Both of us had full-time jobs and were building up the company on nights and weekends. Once we grew up (about six months after getting started) Vishen quit his full-time job and decided to dedicate all of his time towards building MindValley. We had big plans for the company but did not like the costs of doing business in Silicon Valley. Since Vishen is from Kuala Lumpur, we decided to head out to Malaysia to build MindValley.

Why Malaysia?

• The MSC status makes it easy to attract foreign knowledge workers so we can find the best and brightest people from here and abroad
• Vishen was from KL and already very familiar with the country so it was easier to get started here vs. other countries in South East Asia. He also has some big plans for this region…
• We liked to be in an environment where MindValley can quickly become ‘the’ leading Internet company. If you go to other centers such as Bangalore, the salaries are already approaching US levels and there are already hundreds of other highly successful Internet companies. In Malaysia, there is a vacuum of Silicon Valley like startups so over time, we hope to become one of the leaders here, which will help us attract the best and the brightest. And I have to say that the people we have recruited from Malaysia so far are among the smartest people I have ever met or worked with.

2. What kind of web applications are MindValley building? Social networks, office webapps, ecommerce, etc?

We are working on three types of applications:

• Ecommerce applications… We make a lot of money by selling personal development products over the Internet. These are not our products but we have built an expertise in marketing personal development products and some of the leading authors are working with MindValley to sell their goods online. Vishen, myself, and many of our team members are passionate about personal development. Our plan is to become on of the leaders in this $5B market through innovative technologies, web applications, and Internet Marketing.
• We develop breakthrough applications that have the power to be very disruptive, more on this in the next 2 weeks…
• We also love developing tools to help ourselves work better and smarter, such as productivity tools to help us get more work done in less time. In the past month, we have already developed 3 of these applications. Two are completed and have already boosted the productivity of our ecommerce team by 25%. In the coming months, we will start to commercialize these applications.

  For now, we are working on a brand new killer productivity tool for “knowledge workers”, the “ideas people”, or business people in particular. There are A LOT of online to-do-list systems and dozens of tools for product developers to help them with product management (e.g. TRAC, etc.) but we believe we have identified something which will really change the way other knowledge workers get things done.

  KhaiLee, one of our leading thinkers, has conceived of an idea, combining best practices in personal productivity and observations on team dynamics. We are now in the middle of developing this application using Ruby on Rails. Khailee might blog more about it here as we approach the launch date…

3. What’s the IT (especially web 2.0) environment like in KL?

Truth be told, it is just getting started. However, we are focused on the global market. We want to be an international success story and one day list the company on the NASDAQ. So, even though the IT environment in KL is not (yet) world class, it does not stop us or prevent us from being able to successfully compete in the global market. Plus, while the country at large is lagging behind in IT, there are still some of the best and brightest developers in this country and we are lucky to already have a couple of them working for us.

4. If there’s something that MindValley wouldn’t mind doing for free. What would that be?

We are already thinking of how to best give back to the community, and have been looking into different approaches. While have not yet formalized our plans, we will most likely give back by helping people become successful entrepreneurs. Exactly how we will do this has not been formalized. Best to talk to Janne on our team who wants to launch an entrepreneurship university in South East Asia.

5. I am currently based in Singapore, are there any Singaporeans in your talented workforce?

No, but we would love to get the first superstar from Singapore to join our team!