The people in your organization that you should be finding and smothering with praise are the ones who stay late at night or over the weekends making sure things are right. These are the real heroes and should be treated like it. The ones you have to call in to put out a fire are great but they are more opportunist than heroes in my book. Additionally, what message would you rather send, put out a fire and get rewarded or prevent a fire and get rewarded? I’d chose the latter.

There is one thing way worse than the opportunist who waits for fires so they can be the hero, that is the firefighters who are arsons. This phenomenon is known as “Hero Syndrome” in which people crave heroism by creating situations that they can solve. The people who write sloppy code or let junior engineers write bad code and let it get into production so they can be the hero and fix it, they suffer from the Hero Syndrome. Someone who ignores preventative maintenance and waits for things to break should not be rewarded, they should be counseled.

Go find your safety inspectors and reward them. And while your firefighters might have earned a pat on the back, ask the hard questions of why the problem wasn’t found earlier before it impacted your customers.

There have been a couple of reviews written up about The Art of Scalability. Here is one by Raj Oruganti on Srijan and another by Martijn de Boer on Sexybiggetje. You can also follow what’s being Twittered about the book here. And lastly don’t forget to complete Scott Ambler’s “State of the IT Union” Survey for a chance to win a free copy of the book.

We’ve also added some resources for professors who would like to use the book as part of their class. The page can be found on the Resources for Professors page.

Our December article in GigaOm had a brief nod to the myth that conflict in teams is bad.   In fact, practitioner experience and scholarly research agree that there are good forms of conflict and bad forms of conflict.  The good conflict, often referred to as cognitive conflict, is the healthy debate that teams get into regarding what should be or why something should be done and involves a wide range of perspectives and experiences.   Bad conflict, often referred to as affective conflict, is role based and often involves how to do something or who should be doing something.  This of course isn’t to say that all discussions over roles are “bad”, but rather that lingering role based discussions that are perceived as political or territorial can be unhealthy for an organization if not handled properly.

Good, or cognitive conflict, helps teams open up the range of possibilities for action.  Diverse perspectives and experiences work together to attack a problem or an opportunity from multiple angles.  Brainstorming sessions and properly run post mortems are all examples of controlled cognitive conflict with the intent of generating a superior set of alternatives and actions.  Team norms have been shown to have a positive effect on developing cognitive conflict; a culture of acceptance and respect for diverse opinions is more likely to generate more alternatives.   Emotionally and socially intelligent leaders also may help create positive cognitive conflict within teams.  But research shows us that cognitive conflict if left unresolved can escalate to affective (bad) conflict.

Bad (or affective) conflict results in physical and organizational trauma.  Physically, it can leave us drained as the sympathetic nervous system (the same system partially involved in the fight or flight syndrome kicked off by the hypothalamus) releases the stress hormones epinephrine and norepinephrine.   Our blood pressure and heart rate increase, and the adrenal cortex releases 30 different hormones to deal with threats.  Over time, constant affective conflict leaves us drained.  Organizationally, teams fight over ownership and approaches.  Organizations become fractured, and scholarly research shows that the result is a limiting of our options from a tactical and strategic perspective.  The fighting closes our minds to options, meaning we sub-optimize our potential results.

Why is all of this important?  By understanding the sources and results of conflict, we as leaders can drive our teams to have healthy debates and we can quickly end value destroying affective conflict.  Our job is to create a healthy environment suitable to the maximization of shareholder value.  By creating an open, caring and respectful culture we can both maximize cognitive conflict and minimize affective conflict.  By setting clear roles and responsibilities we can limit the sources of affective conflict.  And by hiring a diverse group of people with complementary skills and perspectives we can minimize group think, maximize strategic options and grow quickly!

If you think there are a hundred things you need to worry about as a startup, make it 101; you must not forget about intellectual property infringement. Unfortunately the environment surrounding intellectual property is complex and fraught with dangers for the unwary. Imagine a scenario where you come up with a great idea, spend thousands of hours developing it into a viable product, spend thousands of more hours attracting and retaining customers, only to find out years later that you have infringed someone’s patent and now owe them monetary compensation for the use of the same and potentially punitive damages for willful infringement. Obviously this is not a desirable scenario and therefore it’s worth doing a little bit of homework upfront to try and avoid that outcome.

Our first piece of advice is to seek legal counsel early; pay a little money to an attorney and get some peace of mind. Don’t just read a blog, even ours, and think you can go it alone. Educate yourself but seek experts when needed.

Types of Intellectual Property

A top priority should be to avoid infringing someone else’s ideas and the first step to accomplishing this is to understand the three types of intellectual property: patents, trademarks, and copyrights. These are all governed by federal law.

Copyrights are granted to people for any expressed form of an idea or information that is substantive and discrete. Under the Berne Convention copyright is automatic even without application once it is produced in a “fixed medium”, such as a drawing, document, or electronic file. Copyrights are issued by the U.S. Copyright Office. One of the limitations of the copyright protection is “fair use”, the definition of which is not always clear but allows the use of your work by others for such things as parodies and news.

Trademarks are protect words, names, symbols, sounds, or colors that distinguish goods and services from those manufactured or sold by others. Trademarks are issued by the Trademark Office of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO). Unlike patents, trademarks can be renewed forever as long as they are being used in commerce.

Research

The next step in protecting your startup is to do some research. Use tools such as the Google’s patent search or the search engine at the PTO site to look for patents and applications that are close to your idea. If there are patents that appear to be close to your idea change your idea, design, and implementation now. If you think there could be any doubt call in an expert, someone very experienced in the field and with the relevant patents, or call a patent attorney to receive a legal opinion.

Patent vs Trade Secret

Once your sure you’re not infringing the next decision is how to protect your own intellectual property. Copyrights and trademarks are usually pretty straightforward decisions. Things get murky when deciding between a patent and a trade secret. Trade secrets are intellectual property that is not widely known outside of the company. This can take the form of formulas, processes, or methodologies. A great example of a trade secret is the formula for Coca-cola. The reason this can be a difficult decision is that as soon as a patent is filed it becomes public record and your competitors will gain insight into your business. If you are eventually awarded the patent you gain the sole right to use your idea. If you keep your idea a trade secret but your competition determines how to reverse engineer your product and begins using your idea, you have no recourse.

Patent Application

Once you decide to proceed with a patent the application process can be very long often taking years to complete. The process of receiving a patent starts with an application that includes a specification, a summary of the invention, all claims being made, and a declaration of invention. This application along with the filing fees initiates the process. A reviewer from the PTO studies the application and investigates prior art. The reviewer can issue a patent or reject some or all the claims. If any or all of the claims are rejected the applicant can resubmit the same or modified application. If rejected a second time there is an appeal process that includes the Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences and eventually the US Federal Circuit Court of Appeals.

Conclusion

If you’re unfamiliar with intellectual property this may all seem a bit overwhelming. The two critical things to take away are 1) spend the time upfront to educate yourself and your team and 2) seek expert help when confused or you arrive at a critical decision. The investment in both will be well worth it in the end.

Have you ever been in a position where a project you were managing was late or over budget? Have you ever supported an application that had a customer impacting service outage? How did your boss respond to these issues? Did she say something like “I want a review of our quality strategy” or “I’d like to see our application rollout strategy”? Maybe they asked for something even more nebulous and less connected to the issue at hand like “Show me our site and product integration strategy”. Huh? What does that mean?

It’s easy for managers to react to incidents and problems by requesting that certain actions be taken by a person or team. The problem with such an approach is that it feels like a punitive action to the people from whom the action is being requested. Maybe the group or person needs to receive performance feedback, but by asking them to take an action you are not really giving them feedback. If your goal is to both provide feedback and ensure the underlying issue is corrected then provide candid performance feedback and explain the desired goal of the corrective action.

Great leaders understand intuitively that they should speak in terms of desired end states and then ask for plans to achieve those end goals or states. Another approach is to use the Socratic Method and ask your team what an appropriate end goal should be, whether they’ve achieved it and how they should correct their approach to achieve that goal. The first is probably the best approach when the team is overwhelmed or you are in the middle of a crisis. The latter approach is best for higher performing teams who have simply hit a “bump in the road”.