So You Wanna Start a Corp (Part VI)

Previous Entries

1. Part 1 - Starting Up
2. Part 2 - Components of a Serious Corp
3. Part 3 - Fighting Battle Fatigue
4. Part 4 - Questions to Ask at Startup
5. Part 5 - Being a Leader

VI. The Transition
This is the final (and long overdue) installment of this series, As we wrap up, I wanted to talk about the "what happens next" part of standing up a corporation.

In my mind, there are kind of the 3 phases to a corporation:  Startup, Transition, and Stable Execution.

Most of this series has been about the first phase - Startup.  It's perhaps the hardest (though no phase is particularly "easy") to navigate cleanly.

The next phase is what I think of as Transition.  This is the awkward teenage years of the corporation, where the group finds its true voice, begins to mature, and really begins to look towards the long haul of a well-run corporation.

So, how do you navigate through Transition?

Go Do Something Cool(tm)

This is an addendum to the previous Corp Management post.

Mrs. Durden reminded me of one of my favorite delegation stories.  This one happens to come from the Office, but has implications to your CEO career as well.

Years ago, I switched from a highly stiffling corporate environment (building of 1200-1500 and many many layers of management) to the far less formal group that I still reside with today.  I went from that hyper-corporate environment to a team of about 25 people (at the time) and nearly no oversight at all.

A few months in, I needed to get a demo model done out in the shop for an upcoming conference.  It involved taking an existing piece of equipment and carving on it so that people could see all the little widgets inside move.

My first instinct was to start an email to the shop manager, who I'll call Barry.  The email to Barry started with good intentions, but as I continued to think through how I wanted the model to look and act, the longer it got.  Cut here, paint this, remove this ... paragraph after paragraph of instruction and requirements.

I was about to hit send, but I sat back in my chair for a second and said "Gawd, what a mess.  This is Barry, he knows this crap better than I do.  I'm writing this like it's the old office."

I selected the entire email, hit delete, and then said typed (paraphrasing):

Barry, 

Need a demo model for the conference for product XYZ. 

Recommend you carve up one of the carcasses in the scrap pile. Needs to be onsite before the meeting and look good enough for sr. customers.  If you need help, let me know.   

Otherwise, go do something cool.

A few things happened:

• Barry thought the task was great and commented repeatedly on the chance to get to "do something cool."  He was truly excited about getting full control over the demo model.
• The result far, far exceeded my expectations, came in quicker than needed, and was a hit at the conference. In fact, the demo model has attended every conference since.
• A year or two later, we were having a discussion about delegation and team management and I told this story to the other Leads.  "Go do something cool" has become sort of a catch phrase around the office, a code word for getting "management" the hell out of the way and letting people be creative instead of stifling them with unnecessary requirements.

Now, I could continue to type and sell this as some sort of a feel-good fluffy story about delegation and trust, and how Delegation is a good thing.  And I could probably milk that for another 2 or 3 paragraphs and be done.

Instead, I'll just say that "Go do something cool" is about delegation, but it's MORE about trust and ownership of a problem.  When you have a good, seasoned, veteran crew that truly want to do a good job, just define some high level expectations, trust them, and then get the hell out of the way.

So You Wanna Start a Corp (Part V)

V. BEING A LEADER

Fast forward a month or three or five.  Let's say that you've founded a corp, had a successful kickoff, and you've got a roster of players off being productive.  Good job, my friend.

Things should be great, right?  Then why aren't they?  Why all the drama?  (Or worse ... lack of any activity at all?)

Quite possibly, it's you.  Here are three things you can keep in mind to help you stay ahead of the drama curve.

NOTE:  Before the jump to the full article, I gotta add a disclaimer.  This post is just friggin' chock full of generalizations and strong opinions on how to be a CEO.  They might not work for you.  They might not work in all situations.  The point here, though, is to make you think - to be cognizant of the role you are signing up for as the CEO, and to maybe not take the mantle of Leadership as lightly as some seem to do.

So You Wanna Start a Corp (Part IV)

IV. QUESTIONS TO ASK WHEN YOU START A CORP

1. What Kind of Corp Do You Want to Be?

First, this is usually the wrong frikkin' question.*

So You Wanna Start a Corp (Part III)

This is perhaps the most philosophical post of this series.  Please bear with me.

III.  FIGHTING BATTLE FATIGUE

Let's start with the end:  What Kills a Corporation?

In my experience, one of the biggest Corp killers isn’t drama.  It’s burnout and apathy.

So here’s a scenario.  You find yourself running a Corp.  You have great officers, and you go off and recruit your first group of players.  You’re near your target login amount each night, some informal grouping is going on, and people are generally pretty happy.   Then a few weeks go by, and you notice that over several evenings your logins are down.  The next night a few people leave to be in a different Corp with their friends.  Within a week or three, it’s just you one other guy, and he’s AFK.

What happened?

So You Wanna Start a Corp (Part II)

II.  COMPONENTS OF A SERIOUS CORPORATION

In this installmant, I'll hit you with some ideas of what it means to be a "serious" corporation, and what things you should think about before pulling the trigger and starting up.

A. Serious corporations should have a Charter.  This is a short document and is intentionally brief and somewhat vague, but is intended to define in broad terms what the Corp is about, how their organized, and what their goals are.

I look at the Charter like the U.S. Constitution.  It’s the document that grants powers and rights to the officers and members (leaders and citizens), and allows the leaders to make rules (laws).  It also disallows certain activity to protect the integrity of the system and ensure the rights of its members (citizens).  It is also rather short – it’s an outline; a philosophy that everyone agrees to live by.

Continuing the analogy, all of the gritty detail is found elsewhere.  For example, the U.S. Tax code is hundreds of pages of impossible reading, and but the Tax Code is NOT contained within the Constitution itself.  The Constitution simply says, “Congress shall have power to lay and collect Taxes…” (thanks Wikipedia) and all the detail is elsewhere.

So You Wanna Start a Corp (Part I)

PROLOGUE
(alternately: Who does this guy think he is and why is he bothering us with this crap?)

I'm Abavus Durden, CEO, Mission Grinder, and BPO Slum Lord.  I've now been in/around “leadership” positions in online social games (MMOs in particular) for a little over 20 years.

No, I have never been internet-famous; I've never led a large null alliance, have never troll posted at Failheap or Reddit.  My biggest claim to fame was a short interview in the early episodes of EVE-tv (circa 2008), which many of you won't even remember existed.

I also write a blog, which is apparently how you found this.

Corporate Survey of Thunder and Goodness Results!

The survey is now officially closed.  There were 37 folks who chose to respond, which for a small blog in a small game isn't all that bad.  I was shooting for 50 responses but was happy with 25+.  Oddly enough, 37 is right in between those two numbers.

Background:  First, I figure I should elaborate on why I did this.  I started off wanting to ask a few questions and using the blog comments to collect some thoughts.  But, as the idea started to gel, I realized that I had more than a couple questions I wanted to ask.

The core of my query is to support a future blog series that talks about starting your own corp/alliance and avoiding some of the problems of the first 6 months or so.  I have my own opinions on this, but wanted to see if my ideas held up to reality.

I knew going in that the results would be skewed - you fine readers are a subset of a subset of EVE players (people that read niche blogs as a subset of folks that actually read news outside of the game).  But, SOME feedback is better than NO feedback, so here we are.

And with that out of the way, let's dive into the results.

Corporate Survey of Thunder and Goodness

Along with the new ingame channel (STRING THEORY), I have been working behind the scenes here on a series regarding corporation management.

You can help!

I've initiated one of those annoying free surveys.  The link is here.  There are only 8 multiple choice questions and another 2 optional essay questions (Surveymonkey caps you at 10 questions for the freebie polls).  It should only take a few minutes to complete, and that's if you type a fair bit in the bonus essay.

I'll rip off Slashdot's poll rules:

• Don't complain about lack of options. You've got to pick a few when you do multiple choice. Those are the breaks.
• Feel free to suggest poll ideas/questions if you're feeling creative.
• This whole thing is wildly inaccurate. Rounding errors, ballot stuffers, dynamic IPs, firewalls. If you're using these numbers to do anything important, you're insane.

And no, I don't know exactly what I'm going to do with the results.  I'm making this up as I go. :)