Rewarding Success & Celebrating Victory
By Luke Murray
Andy Cox manages our art gallery, fixes up our art studio, and is just an all around handyman. He is great! Andy’s most recent project was to install a “Victory Bell” - an idea we got from Gray Construction - a local construction company here in Lexington that rings a giant bell mounted near the roof of their building at the closing of each contract…one ring for every million dollars the contract was worth. We decided this idea was awesome…so we replicated it for ourselves and put it in the same room as our failure dashboard.
Almost as important as encouraging failure is rewarding & celebrating success. Celebrating success is easy to do as long as you remember to do it. You don’t have to mount a bell to a 4″x4″…just throw a party (or do whatever your company culture would consider ‘fun’).
Rewarding success, however, can be a little tougher because it typically requires more resources than taking an extended and festive break (aka. ‘party’). Since Awesome Inc. isn’t flush with cash right now (or really any other resource besides great people like Andy) we have to get creative in the ways that we reward success. Luckily we have found that most of the people that help out around here are happy and self-motivated by the intrinsic reward of doing something they consider awesome…and they stay that way. Lots of this has to do with the fact that this place is already filled with happy people, but the other part (we’d like to think) is that we’ve consciously made sure that those that did good work and/or succeeded in their endeavors were appreciated.
There are several ways in which you can ‘positively motivate’ people. In Jack Welch’s book “Winning” he notes that the three main ways are: 1. Money 2. Training 3. Recognition/Reward. Some incentives (i.e. promotions) are a combination of both money and recognition. The more you are aware of what types of rewards motivate people, the more effective you can be with your resources to do so.
As I look back on the tools we’ve used to motivate people thus far, we really haven’t used much of #1 or #2, and in the classic sense, we haven’t done much with #3 either. I’d like to say that the main reason we have yet to use these tools as motivators is because we don’t have the money to, but the more I look at it, the more I realize that we haven’t done a very significant step. One of the most important things that needs to be in place before we can start rewarding people via #1, #2, or #3, or ringing our victory bell is that we have to have clear metrics/measurements of their success.
At Gray Construction it’s very simple: One ring for every million dollars of a closed contract. At Awesome Inc. each person is working on a different project (The Interactive Touchscreen in Labs, The Awesome Inc. Experience, The Awesome Space, events, and then you have the individual companies) and while each company has clear goals and milestones, we have yet to pick which ones are important enough to be celebrated or rewarded with a party, a bell ringing, or anything else. We need to define ‘celebratable’ success for each department or project. Maybe we should only ring it for every million dollars we make as well? The point is we have to define which success should get celebrated before we can start throwing parties just yet.
Up to this point we have done a very good job with giving people recognition informally in weekly meetings, or giving small gifts or (and this is hands down the most important and most effective) being frequently and sincerely appreciative of people’s help. But as we move forward, we need to crystallize our definition(s) of success so we can apply more principles of motivation to encourage it…and so do you, that is, if you expect to motivate your team towards awesomeness as well.
Just remember that when you do throw that party, follow rule #17…
“Bring the Fun”
How to Get People to Fail More
By Luke Murray
Winners are the ones who fail.
Failures are the ones who never play.
First, the best podcasts on entrepreneurship are the ones found at Stanford’s Entrepreneur Corner, or e-corner (http://ecorner.stanford.edu/podcasts.html). Speakers for Stanford’s Entrepreneur Seminar Series include such high profile people as Carly Fiorina (former HP CEO), Steve Balmer (Microsoft CEO), and Mark Zuckerberg (facebook founder & CEO). However, one of the best talks I’ve heard in this series (and I’ve listened to at least half of the 100+ lectures) is by the director of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program - Tina Seelig. She teaches entrepreneurship at Stanford and gave a talk on how to do this well.
The part from the lecture that stuck out to me the most was how much she encouraged failure. The ratio of your successes to failures is probably going to stay the same, so the path to more successes is more failures. The same is true in so many other things in life - the salesman with the most sales has probably been told ‘no’ the most, the baseball player with the most hits probably has the most strikeouts, the musician with the most hit singles probably has more “dud” songs than other musicians…and the person with the most successful company has probably had more failed companies and more failures within their current company than the person with the mediocre company.
So, if failure is so important to success, then why don’t people do it? The same reason they don’t go skydiving or ride rollercoasters…the perception of danger. 99.99% of the time, going skydiving or riding in a rollercoaster will not kill you or even hurt you. But people see what could happen and this keeps them from doing it. To a much lesser degree, people don’t embrace failure in life because of the perceived pain as well. Getting shot down by a girl at a bar doesn’t actually physically harm you or put you in danger in any way. Neither does being rejected when selling a product, or putting together an event that nobody shows up to. It’s just not worth the perceived danger or the damage to our egos or feelings.
How do you fight this? How do you create a culture that embraces and celebrates failures? We don’t know yet, but here at Awesome Inc. we must figure it out if we want to build a culture full of winners. This is what we’ve done so far:
- Go Big Friday - fail big every Friday. The risk must have a massive potential upside for you and a very high likelihood of failure. It must be at least somewhat relevant to your personal goals (i.e. contact the president of the most successful company in town and ask to meet with them). Twitter hashtag: #gobigfriday. Website: www.throughfailure.com
- The Failure Dashboard - a large whiteboard in the middle of our break room where you record your failure & the lesson you learned from it. Awards will be given monthly for the largest failure and the highest number of failures each month.
What ideas do you have that would help create a culture that encourages trying new things and embraces failure as a tool to reach success?
Start-Up Slam: Six New Kentucky Companies by Lunch
By Matt McGarvey
That’s right…six new innovation-driven Kentucky companies started by lunch. Not a bad morning’s work. Ten additional entrepreneurs signed-up for vouchers to start their company within the next 90 days.
This was the outcome of a Start-up Slam held in Lexington on Friday, November 20th at Awesome Inc. Start-up Slams are a new experiment of the Kentucky Science and Technology Corporation (KSTC) and its partners – the Cabinet for Economic Development’s Department of Commercialization and Innovation and the Council on Postsecondary Education…as part of an ongoing strategy to build new entrepreneurial companies in the State. Slams bring together entrepreneurs and business professionals in a high-energy setting to learn, network and start innovation-driven companies.
A similar event was held in October in Louisville at the Louisville Science Center and one is scheduled for Northern Kentucky on March 19, 2010 at NKU’s Center for Entrepreneurship. A potential 25 to 30 new companies could be started as a result of just the Louisville and Lexington events alone. Slams are now in the works for Eastern and Western Kentucky as well.
For additional information or to learn more about the Start-Up Slams, click here or contact Matt McGarvey at (859) 233-3502 ext. 240 or mmcgarvey at kstc.com.
