I just read this article on OPEN Forum by the Behance team title Can Good Teamwork Involve Fighting? Great article!

I think fighting is an integral part of a strong team — with a few caveats, of course.  Here’s some thoughts on how to encourage productive fighting for the betterment of the team or project.

1) Come to a resolution at the end.

At the end of the debate or meeting, it’s important that someone wraps up the points of the fight, and that the team comes to a resolution.  Like that axiom for marriages (don’t go to bed angry), don’t leave a meeting angry.

It helps to have an uneven number of team members and/or a strong leader.  With an uneven number of team members, you can put the conflict to a vote*.  With a strong leader, they can weigh the options and pick a resolution.

* At KAM, we vote with percentages. What I mean by that is I might say, “I’m only 60/40 in favor of X, but you’re 90/10 for Y, so we should probably go with Y.”  Or we may choose to not fight too hard for something. Eg., “I believe 90/10 that X is the right way to go, but I don’t care that much about it, so we’ll go with your idea.”

Even if there are still unresolved points of contention by the end of the meeting, someone should summarize where the team does have (near) consensus.  Throw out the rejected ideas, embrace the stronger points.  Basically, move the argument along so the team knows where it stands.  It’s not helpful to rehash the same old arguments at tomorrow’s meeting. There’s probably new issues to fight over.

2) After the fight, everyone’s on the same page.

Once a resolution is reached by the team, it’s important for individual team members to not hold grudges or undermine the team’s decision.

If your idea is not what wins, you can’t keep reminding people (especially external people) that the team made a “bad decision” by not adopting your views.  After the fight, after the meeting, everyone’s back on the same page supporting the same conclusion.

This reminds me of what my pastor used to say after a contentious church election.  We may be divided during the debates and election process, but once someone wins, we are one unified congregation again.

3) Strong teams encourage dissenting opinions.

I want to hear all sides.  Heck, the Supreme Court even publishes dissenting opinions — it makes their final judgements stronger, not weaker.

If your team is always harmonious and everyone seems to share the same opinions, that’s a bad sign.  There’s two huge problems I see:

1. Team members may not feel comfortable enough sharing their dissenting opinions.  If the team can’t talk openly with each other behind closed doors, that points to a problem with the team dynamics and/or leadership.
2. If dissenting opinions aren’t presented, the team doesn’t get the benefit of seeing the problem from all angles and may miss out on awesome solutions or opportunities.

4) Everyone’s on the same team, with the same goals.

It’s helpful that we all want the same thing — success of the company or project.  That helps make fights productive.  If fights are becoming especially heated, it’s helpful to remind everyone what the overarching goal is — ie., company/team success.  Then if needed, refocus the fight on accomplishing that goal.

5) Pick your battles.

Fighting for the sake of fighting isn’t helpful.  And if you’re the one who’s always playing devil’s advocate and starting an argument, people will want to stop talking to you.  Save your “fight juice” for the battles that are important.

It’s helpful for our daily motivation to keep in mind why we do the work we do.  Maybe it’s to feed our families or to change the world or to be filthy rich.  No matter what the reasons are, keeping the reasons we go in to work everyday front of mind helps us do a better job and makes us happier on a day-to-day basis.

Here are my three reasons for working on Killer Aces.  (These were always floating around somewhere in my mind — maybe not quite articulated, but they were in there somewhere — and reading Philip’s post Dream Job or Day Job? this week pushed me to write them down.)

1. Financial independence.

This is the greed part of it.  I want to be rich not for wealth’s sake, but to have the freedom to do what I want.  One of my success visions of “financial freedom” is being able to book a flight to the other side of the world on a whim, and not having to worry about cost or scheduling.

2. Ownership of work.

This is the ego part of it. I was tired of doing work that benefited someone else.  I wanted to own my work.

3. Contribute to humankind / human history.

This is the fulfilling part.  Some ego plays into this too.

I want to do work that matters.  I want to make people’s lives better and leave a mark on human history.

I’ve worked in IT for nearly 10 years now.  First as a help desk operator, then a Linux sysadmin, and now a Drupal developer/webmaster.   In that time, I’ve run into a handful of really perplexing problems.  ”Perplexing” meaning after hours (usually, days) of troubleshooting, I can’t figure out why the system is suddenly unstable.

You know those type of problems, right?

The kind that’s so perplexing that you’re sure it’s gotta be a hardware problem, even though your years of admin experience tells you it’s almost never (like 99.999% of the time) a hardware issue.  But you’ve looked at (seemingly) all the possible software causes.

I was just reminded of this recently, and I’m here to remind you:  It’s never a hardware problem.  It’s always a software problem.

PS: If you’re looking for VPS or dedicated server hosting, Rimu Hosting is a great choice.  When they say they have “professional technical support with a personal touch”, they mean it.  Rimu has by far the best support team of the half-dozen hosting companies I’ve worked with. And great support is the only differentiator that matters when choosing a hosting vendor.

As I read Fred Wilson’s commentary on the Ideal First Round Term Sheet, I was thinking that it’d be nice if there was a “for dummies” type of introduction to the term sheet. A term sheet is the contract between the entrepreneur/company and the investors/VC.  It’s full of jargon that a first-time entrepreneur, who is busy building a company, is probably not familiar with.

Wouldn’t you know it, Brad Feld (another VC) has already written a very informative series on Term Sheets.  Here’s the entire series:

1. Price
2. Liquidation Preference
3. Board of Directors
4. Protective Provisions
5. Drag Along
6. Anti-Dilution
7. Pay-to-Play
8. Dividends
9. Redemption Rights
10. Conversion
11. Conditions Precedent to Financing
12. Vesting
13. Information Rights
14. Registration Rights
15. Right of First Refusal
16. Voting Rights
17. Employee Pool
18. Restriction on Sales
19. Proprietary Information and Inventions Agreement
20. Co-Sale Agreement
21. Founders Activities
22. Initial Public Offering Shares Purchase
23. No Shop Agreement (also Unilateral or Serial Monogamy)
24. Indemnification
25. Assignment

Yammer has a new desktop client.

I like that you can pop out threads into new, separate windows.  Handy for keeping track of a particular conversation.  Best of the new features.

The new client feels snappier because your own updates are posted immediately in the client.  The sluggishness of the old client had me looking at Present.ly.

I don’t like that scrolling updates moves the input form too.  Very bad usability.

They got rid of the multiple skins.  That’s unfortunate because I like a darker color scheme and this new version is very bright.  But it’s not a big deal.

While we’re talking about Yammer, I’ll throw out some feature requests for the desktop and iPhone clients.

Desktop client:

• Presence indicator.  Like green for active (typed or moved mouse in last 60 seconds), yellow for semi-active (Yammer client open but no keyboard/mouse activity in a while), and gray for not online.
• Setting to resize text globally (smaller, larger).

iPhone client:

• Landscape mode for easy input.
• Search.
• View threads.

I know you have a lot of awesome ideas in your head. Maybe you have several projects deep into development. There’s a ton of potential there. Just imagine the benefits!

Problem is, all we can do is imagine it. It doesn’t exist unless it’s out there, live for the world to play with.

Sprint that last mile to launch, and launch already! 99.9% done (and thousands of hours in development invested) has exactly the same value as the idea I came up with 10 minutes ago — which is exactly nothing, nada, zero, zip, zilch. Oh-so-close to launch doesn’t mean squat for anyone outside your organization.

So launch faster next time. Don’t wait for it to be perfect. Just iterate more often.

I’m rereading Seth Godin’s The Bootstrapper’s Bible via DailyLit. I read the book 3 years ago from cover to cover before we launched Killer Aces.

I’m not sure how much I absorbed back then, reading the book before having started a company.  Rereading it now, I see that some of the Bootstrapper’s Manifesto has stuck with us.  Some of the lessons we had to learn the hard way for ourselves.

Anyway I have three thoughts to share.

1. If you’re an entrepreneur building a new business, do yourself a favor by reading Seth’s book. Even if you have VC funding, this book is applicable. It could just as accurately be called The Underdog Company’s Bible.

There’s no excuse. You can get the book for free as a PDF download or an email series from DailyLit.

2. Rereading the book after I’ve had a couple of years experience is eye opening. I’m absorbing more of the lessons because I can immediately think of actual business issues we’re dealing with now or have dealt with in the past.

Being able to apply the concepts to actual, real world problems makes them so much more meaningful versus trying to learn the lessons in abstract.

So go reread those old business books. There are probably new lessons you can pick up now that you have more real world experience.

3. DailyLit is a great way to read books for time strapped executives. Actually DailyLit is great for anyone that (a) has no time to read and (b) lives in their email inbox anyway.

It’s hard to find an extra hour everyday to read, but it’s easy to spend 5 minutes reading just another email.  It’s also good for people like me who can’t put a book down at the end of a chapter. The end of the email is the signal to move on and work on something.

Productivity, work-life balance, saying no… these are things I’m always struggling with. Always have, but hopefully not always will.

It’s gotten harder since I started working for myself (and my two partners) instead of a boss. Because now, I’m in charge of my own todo list. This is scary. Left to my own devices, I tend to work on what is most interesting to me at the moment. 90% of the time, it’s not what the company needs most at the moment. And when you’re bootstrapping a company, there isn’t enough time to spend all day on “fun long-term” projects.

Incidentally, working on fun long-term projects all day is one of the rewards I’m looking forward to when we have a highly profitable company that doesn’t need me on a day-to-day basis. Forget the yacht, I want to work on interesting things with no looming deadlines.

Anyway, one trick I use to keep from falling too deeply into the rabbit hole of a non-critical but supremely interesting project is to deliver at least one thing a day. Just one solid deliverable a day.

Here are some signs that something has been delivered (in my world, anyway):

1. Email partners or other people I’m accountable to (eg., bloggers counting on me for tech support, outside bloggers waiting for a response, etc) regarding some open question or issue. Puts the ball back in their court.

2. Write or update documentation. It’s not done until it’s been documented.

3. Commit code, increment the version number, and add an entry to the changelog. Look! A record that something changed!

4. Resolve a trouble ticket. Closed ticket! Yeah!

When I find myself exploring (read: being distracted by) something new and cool, and I realize what’s happening, I tell myself I can come back to exploring this thing after I do one of the above.

Just deliver one thing today. Then you can go play.

The “whoever’s there” conversations that occur in hallways, around a person’s desk, or in the break room are critical components of a company’s culture.

And a company’s culture is its soul.  Success or failure starts there.  So, you know, this meaningless banter is actually pretty important.

When everyone’s working remotely, it can be easy to lose that daily touch.  Without a place where people can just talk to whoever’s around, we lose the team building and serendipitous discovery that comes with talking about stuff that’s too small for IM / email / forums.

This post about what it’s like to work at 37Signals clarified a half-thought that’s been bugging me lately.  For a dispersed team like Killer Aces, a place where “whoever’s there” banter can occur should be the centerpiece of an intranet.

I just discovered Google Chart API.  You can create charts on-the-fly by manipulating a url. This is way easier (and prettier) than the PHP library I was going to use.

Once again I’m very impressed with Google.

(Big hat tip to Stack Overflow for already having the answer to my question about easiest way to create charts in PHP. Stack Overflow is getting more and more useful for devs. Thanks Jeff Atwood, Joel Spolsky and the entire SO team for putting the site together!)

Examples:

1. Create a “google-o-meter”.

http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=gom&chd=t:93&chl=Awesome&chs=400×150

How awesome is Google Chart API?

2. Create a bar chart.

What happens when you chart the top 20 personal finance bloggers ranked by subscribers?

URL for the above chart (you can also click on it to go to the generated image):

http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?
cht=bhs&
chd=t:62862,60462,33124,22527,15092,13488,11252,10526,10417,10052,
7501,7297,6177,5631,5444,5244,5186,5094,4590,4322&
chbh=a&
chs=500x400&
chds=0,75000&
chxt=x,y&
chxl=1:|Generation%20X%20Finance|The%20Digerati%20Life|All%20Financial%20Matters|
Being%20Frugal|No%20Credit%20Needed|The%20Centsible%20Sawyer|
Million%20Dollar%20Journey|Common%20Sense%20With%20Money|Frugal%20Dad|
Stop%20Buying%20Crap|Bargaineering|Five%20Cent%20Nickel|
Consumerism%20Commentary|My%20Money%20Blog|Free%20Money%20Finance|
Coupon%20Cravings|Deal%20Seeking%20Mom|Wise%20Bread|The%20Simple%20Dollar|
Get%20Rich%20Slowly|0:|0|25000|50000|75000

3. Create a pie chart.

Search share of personal finance personalities (searches per month for their name):

URL that generated this chart:

http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?
cht=p3&
chd=t:368,246,125&
chs=550x150&
chl=Dave%20Ramsey%20(368,000)|Suze%20Orman%20(246,000)|Robert%20Kiyosaki%20(135,000)