Blogless

For several years, I worked with a startup, which, more than anything else, is really just a process of convincing yourself that all the pain now is worth the rewards in the future. Or else your startup is privately funded, in which case you basically work for a corporation with a policy where employees can give themselves their own job titles, but I digress, and anyway, this was not the case for me.

From my experience dealing with people in both situations, though, I think it is safe to assume that either way, you are surrounded by people thinking about money. I did this. I inadvertently surrounded myself with people who thought and cared a lot more about money than I did.

And you know what? Slowly but surely, I started to care about money. It crept up on me. I started thinking about it. I started using it as motivation for myself and the people on my team.

I turned into exactly what I didn’t want to be, and it was because I had nothing else. The hours were crap, the pay was bad, the responsibility was enormous. I had no social life to speak of, and barely any sleep. It was everything it wasn’t supposed to be.

So that ended (I won’t tell you how). And after a several-month tailspin coming out of the experience, I am glad to say I’ve finally got something else again: My little design firm, Design Less Better.

Everyone has said this. Jason Fried famously admonished us to, "keep it small. Start small and stay small."

Maybe even more famously, Joel Spolsky did some work way back at the turn of the century to explain the value of the slow-growth "organic" business model: "With the Ben and Jerry’s model, if you’re even reasonably smart, you’re going to succeed." Not that we listened.

Then, last month, The New Yorker’s James Surowiecki, wrote an article about Toyota, which, after seventy-seven years of GM industry leadership in cars sold per annum, is about to take over the throne. Why? Surowiecki argues:

Instead of trying to throw long touchdown passes, as it were, Toyota moves down the field by means of short and steady gains.

And, even better:

…if Toyota doesn’t look like an innovative company it’s only because our definition of innovation — cool new products and technological breakthroughs, by Steve Jobs-like visionaries — is far too narrow.

And if we web-types can learn something from Toyota’s corporate fairy tale, it’s the same thing we can learn from Fog Creek Software. Here’s a little more from its founder, Joel: "The trouble with the Amazon model is that all anybody thinks about is Amazon. And there’s only one Amazon."

Here’s the trick, as I see it. Despite the fact that I could have quoted any of this to you three years ago, I still fell prey to Amazon-thinking. And I did because it is incredibly easy to do just that. More from Surowiecki:

Toyota’s innovative methods may seem mundane, but their sheer relentlessness defeats many companies. That’s why Toyota can afford to hide in plain sight: it knows the system is easy to understand but hard to follow.

And it’s hard to follow precisely because for the overwhelming majority of the time, we don’t like where we are already more than where we think we can be. In order to be relentless in your dedication to incremental change, slow growth, and happiness over adrenalin, you need to already have something you like more than money.

You’ve got to have the thing you’re not willing to throw away on the big money and the fabulous prizes, your little design firm (here, Australia).