Dave Romero - Boise, ID

Though I haven’t posted on tumblr much in the past few months, there’s a ton of great stuff happening! At Tsuvo we’ve been implementing a gamut of changes to our workplace including a transition to the 4-day-work-week, agile development, and recently something we call Tsuvo Boot Camp.  These are entirely exploratory, imposed for the short term with the possibility of long-term adoption, and are modeled on successes of other start-ups, SMBs and corporations.  

While there are many great workplace models from which we draw inspiration, everything we’re implementing at Tsuvo has its own unique flavor, benefits, and challenges :)

Here’s a brief synopsis of our current experiments:

Four-day-work-week

The four-day-week-week is self-explanatory however, our version consists of four 10-hour days: Mon-Thurs.  Like most workplace experiments at Tsuvo, the 4DWW is focused on improving our quality of life and the quality of our firm’s deliverables simultaneously. Though it’s difficult to measure, we believe in a direct correlation between the happiness our our employees and the quality of our output — it’s a pillar of our company.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four-day_week

We started the 4DWW in August 2010, and in three and a half months have already measured very positive results which we aptly named “our return-on-happiness.”  Turns out that having a three day weekend every weekend does great things for overall productivity, energy, and vision.

Agile Development

Agile is a product development methodology that focuses on: rapidly and iteratively developing a working product (rarely fully featured), aggregating end-user feedback during the process, and actively adjusting to change.  This methodology prioritizes users & interactions over features & tools.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agile_development

We’ll slowly be integrating agile over the next 6 months and are excited to leave any lingering ‘cowboy-coding’ tendencies in the dust.  We’ve been doing daily scrums (morning meetings where we identify tasks, timelines, and blocks) for the past two months and are close to being able to determine an ideal length for our agile sprints.

Tsuvo Boot Camp

TBC is a system we created to impart a higher level of accountability for our team members in the areas of task & time management.  The premise is this: if each of us are more accountable for performing and communicating our day-to-day tasks, we’ll become wholly more productive. Fairly simple in theory albeit more difficult in execution. An additional goal for TBC is to provide a clearer distinction between work and play (a reflection ‘work hard, play hard’ philosophy) and to reinforce traits which are resounded by successful tech companies.

We just began TBC this last week (Nov 15th).  I’ll be able to give more feedback on this in coming months but for now, the jury is out!

So what’s next?

• Discover additional formal and informal mechanisms for tracking the progress.
• Run each of these experiments for a sufficient length of time to gain a large enough set of sample data to allow for a confident assessment of whether each experiment positively or negatively affected productivity and quality of life.
• Act on assessments and repeat with new experiments!

Looking forward to some very exciting things from Tsuvo in the next several months. Cheers!

The following are my thoughts on the ceaseless debate of quantity vs quality (as they pertain to businesses’ rendering of products and services)

I’ve admittedly been hyper-conscious on this lately as I’ve been taking on the challenge of overcoming the quality-quantity dichotomy.

Let’s start with a synopsis of: ‘high quantity paired with low quality’

What are the pros?

• Larger, more diverse client-base
• Greater economies-of-scale
• Shorter sales cycle
• More sales volume, and external exposure
• Consistent cash flow

What are the cons?

• Risking the “death valley” of average price points
• Fewer points-of-differentiation amongst competitors

And ‘low quantity paired with high quality’

What are the pros?

• Higher price points
• Many points-of-differentiation amongst competitors
• Ability to attract better talent
• Ability to establish a culture of excellence

What are the cons?

• Smaller client-base
• Oscillating cash flow
• Magnetism to niche markets
• Scarcity of specialized employees
• Slower sales cycle

If you’re thinking that the pros and cons of each of these approaches balance out, you’re probably right.  On paper, neither is better or worse, they are in fact two different organizational structures with a similar net-effect on cash flow and an organization’s overall success.

I want to pose a final, very important thought:

Can high quality + high quantity be achieved?

My answer is ABSOLUTELY.

Here’s a list of techniques you can use to help overcome the quality vs quantity dichotomy:

• Increase your quality by:
  • Productizing your offerings
    
    • Assign your offerings an identity
    • Clearly define deliverables
    • Make your offerings serializable
    • Iteratively increase value
    • Iteratively improve time-to-produce

• Increase your quantity by:
  • Creating and using business processes to increase efficiency
    
    • Become ridiculously consistent in reproducing your offerings
    • Constantly monitor performance metrics
    • Constantly refine processes - based on performance metrics
  • Never (ever) doing the same work twice
    • Compound value by performing work that can be reused or repurposed
    • Create a knowledge-base or repository of past-performed work and make it easily accessible

I hear it all the time. From my friends, family and coworkers - “You deserve a vacation.”  And, I finally agreed with them.  Several weeks ago I got a call from Dad, Cpt. John Romero of Owyhee Air.  He asked if I’d be interested in doing a backcountry flying/fishing trip with he and my brother Joe - I of course obliged.  I thought to myself ‘great, this is the perfect opportunity to prove to my friends that I am capable of not thinking about the business for two seconds.’  It’s not that it needed to be proven, I’m just intent on not becoming known as a work-a-holic.  But wait - if you love what you do is it really work?  …there I go justifying myself again.

So Wednesday finally came around and it was time to start packing.  It’s a shame too because I didn’t really begin packing until about 2:00am on Thursday morning, three hours before waking up and driving to the Owyhee Air office.  I was told specifically to ‘pack light’ and that’s exactly what I did.  Maybe too light in fact.  I later realized all of the essential camping items that I had forgotten… oh well.

I met Joe, Ben and Dad at the airport and we loaded the plane and took off by 7:00.  It took no more than two hours to reach our destination: Soldiers Bar - a backcountry airstrip in the middle of idaho with a purported difficulty rating of 32.  A  backcountry flying guide book I reveiwed before the trip stated that this particular airstrip was to be used for “emergency purposes only”.  Sweet. Us Romeros are always up for a challenge.

Fortunately there was an emergency at hand that would adequately justify landing on this strip - we desperately needed a vacation and to get as far from civilization as possible.  We were lucky enought to be flying with a veteran pilot.  If Dad could land F-4 Phantoms and 777’s he could assuredly make this landing strip look like cheesecake - all 1200 ft of it.  And that’s what he did.

Once on the ground we set up camp and began planning out a our strategy for the day.  It was pretty simple.  Hike, then fish, hike more, then fish more, and so forth.  In the first day, the four of us hiked no less than 8 miles and caught no fewer than 20 fish each.  It was spectacular.  Joe, Ben and Dad were on flyrods and I was on a bait-caster.  It didn’t much matter what we had on the end of our rods because the fish were obviously not discriminatory.

At the end of the day we were all sunburnt, a little tired and ready to hit the hay.  Our state of pure satisfaction and exhaustion was a reminder of something Dad had told me since I was a kid: “Work hard, play hard.”

Friday morning came around and we prepared ourselves what we thought would be another day full of fishing and (hopefully) slightly less hiking.  However, we had no idea how far the day would really take us.  It was our goal to hike down to the middle fork of the Salmon river which we estimated to be about a mile from camp.  One mile turned into two miles, turned into eight miles - and that was just one-way.  When we finally made it to the middle fork and we’re pleasantly greeted by several rafters who offered cold beer - we cheerfully accepted.

A little sore but still determined, we began the grueling hike back up river with the intent of fishing at each and every good fishing hole we had seen on the way down.  We caught about five more fish each and saw some of the most extraordinary petraglyphs on the way.  To say the very least, the scenery in this canyon was incredible.  For every 20 minutes we hiked the trail introduced a completely unique envoronment with accompanying shrubs and creatures.  We ventured through butterfly-strewn forrests, across Mars-esque crags, and through waist-deep rushing rivers.

We clocked about 15-18 miles that day. Wow.  We were all glad we had an overabundance of Cliff bars and dry Gatorade mix because we had about 5000 calories to make up for.  I think we still ended up in the negative but at least we won’t have to go to the gym for a few days.

That evening we were slated to fly out around 7:00 but our plan had a few caveats:  we could only fly out of this canyon if there was less than a ten knot tailwind.  With such a short airstrip, 1000 lbs of passengers/gear, every variable would matter.  We waited around for the mother nature to lend us favorable flying conditions but it didn’t happen. It was now 8:00 and we had to make a decsion:  camp out one more night and miss some very important next-day obligations or change some variables to make flying possible.  The only variable we had control over in this case was the weight of our plane.  The gear would have to stay.  We removed all of gear from the plane, shoved it between several large bushes, covered it with a tarp and that was that.  The plane was now lighter and we now had the confidence to attempt a safe takeoff.

We loaded up (again), gunned the throttle and we were off.  Of the 1200 ft of runway we used about 1100 ft.  Our nerves were tense as we barely squeaked out of the canyon.  It was the perfect climax to a wonderful couple days of excitement, perspective and pure bliss.

At current, our gear is still in the middle of Idaho sitting in a bush. Captain Romero is going to make another trip out (tomorrow hopefully) to comandeer our gear.  It should be a nice reminder of the great trip that we all had.

I am completely refreshed and am ready to get back to business with a bit of new perpective. Thanks Dad for planning everything and for being a fantastic tour guide, not only on this trip, but through life.

Looking back on the past year has been breathtaking.  It’s truly amazing how much a team can accomplish with a concrete set of goals and a little bit of drive.  (Although most would argue that there has been a lot of drive).

I can say without question that the past year has made me a much more informed business person as well as a far better communicator. The lessons I’ve appreciated most are not those that apply to the strategy involved in business decision making but the ones that have taught how to be satisfied with and accept decisions the decisions that I make.

As a business owner who lives and breathes his profession (are we all?!), I know all too well how easy it is to look back and think “I could have done that better,” “we could have finished that project faster,” and so on… Business leaders are burdened with the task of measuring the success of their decisions short term and long and the consequences that they bare.  Even with this weight, I’ve lately found solice in knowing that it’s nearly impossible to know whether the decisions I make are truly the best possible decision at that point in time.

Given an environment where thousands of variables are present at all times, distinguishing a ‘good’ decision from the “best” decision is a very difficult thing, especially considering there are many different ways to measure the success of a decision.

Apart from a considering a decision’s inherent effect on an organization’s bottom line, I also consider whether it aligns with our mission.  Every business is but a compilation of decisions over a period of time.  This series of decisions makes up our reputation and identity.  It’s no different than how our personal decisions make up who we are.  The question I ask myself daily is “am I satisfied with the way my decisions transform the identity of our organization?”  Fortunately, I can always answer yes if my decisions uphold the ethical imperitives and quality standards to which we as a business collectively subrscribe.

This type of thinking has been very valuable to me in creating a context for making what I consider ‘sound’ business decisions.  I beleive that our personal identities are constantly in a state of flux and that the that same applies to our business.  I also believe that the ability to make sound decisions on both a personal level and business level is rooted in having a consistent context which is well communicated.

Because we all have different ways of measuring the success of our decisions, the context of our decision making varies greatly.  For some it’s ethics, for others it’s a private interest, the bottom line, feeling of obligation, etc..

What’s your context for make decisions?  What measures do you use to determine whether your decisions are ‘sound’?

Just got to Java and met Joe for some Sunny Slopes - if you’ve never tried this iced tea I’d recommend you do so.  We discussed some of the usuals including moutain biking, work, and most importantly his move to DC.  Joe is selling every possession he owns and is starting anew in Washington DC in a few weeks.  Impressive if you ask me.  I think that every person, at least once in their life, should do what Joe is doing right now.

Letting go of possessions is generally something that people have a difficult time with, and usually for its emotion implications.  We are all well versed in attachment (as it’s defined in psychology) to some extent however, with the right sense of adventurousness it can be overcome. Joe and I are both lucky in this rite as we’ve never had difficulty in ‘up-and-moving’. Through a fair amount of world travel we’ve learned that you never really need anything more than the bare essentials: food, water, shelter, and bit of resourcefulness.

All I can say is that I am very excited for Joe’s move - mostly for him and partially because I have an excuse to come visit him in DC!