We think most ‘self-improvement’ techniques are a bit, how can we put it, ‘lame’. It is great to find some really simple, helpful ideas about how you can make yourself happier. In this one minute talk, Jennifer Aaker speaks at Business of Software about the small steps you can take, today, tomorrow, next week, to increase your effectiveness and meaningfulness in your work and life.

You can find out more about Jennifer on her web site, or follow her on twitter.

Better still, come and join us at Business of Software 2012. 1-3rd October 2012 in Boston, Ma. #BoS2012 takes place over 2 and a half days 1st-3rd October, 2012, at the InterContinental Hotel, Boston.

BUSINESS OF SOFTWARE – FOR PEOPLE BUILDING GREAT SOFTWARE BUSINESSES.

“If you’re a serious software entrepreneur in any stage, it will change your life to attend Business of Software.” Jason Cohen, Smart Bear Software and WP Engine.

Speakers include Kathy Sierra, Professor Noam Wasserman, Dan Pink, Jason Cohen, Gail Goodman, Mikey Traft, Adii Pienaar, Joel Spolsky, Dan Lyons, Peldi, Paul Kenny, Noah Kagan, Bob Dorf, Dharmesh Shah and others who spend their lives at the sharp end of software businesses around the world. We hope you will be able to join us.

There is a $600 discount on the full ticket price till midnight PST 9th August. Ticket prices then rise by $100 every two weeks until 10 days prior to the event when they will be available, if we have not sold out, for the full price of $2,495. If you didn’t make it to last year’s event, you will also get access to all of the talks from BoS 2011 when you register for BoS 2012.

Early Bird Registration Deadline midnight PST 9th August

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A follow up on our Startup two for one offer at Business of Software. We did say we would try to match founders who wanted to take advantage but here is an easier way.

Here’s the deal for single startup founders – save 50%.

If you’re a single founder and want to grow a great software business, we would love you to come to:

“The best conference of the year”, (Tobi Lutke, CEO, Shopify)

Don’t take our (Or Tobi’s) word for it though… Jason Cohen, (Smart Bear Software and WP Engine) says:

“If you’re a serious software entrepreneur in any stage, it will change your life to attend Business of Software: businessofsoftware.org“

Dharmesh Shah, CTO & Founder, Hubspot calls it,

“My favorite Conference”

Joel Spolsky, CEO, Fog Creek & Stack Exchange

“Every speaker is a keynote quality speaker… What you are learning is how to make a product that is useful in the world.”

And here is ALL the feedback from last year… And who’s coming to Business of Software this year?.

So, if you want to come, and can’t take advantage of the Business of Software Startup BOGOF – either because you are a single founder or you you don’t think you can afford to send two founders out of the office/bedroom/Starbucks/incubator/AOL (we love that story), the price just, ‘feels too much right now’ and you don’t know if it will be ‘value right now’, or whatever…

If you are a startup founder, you can attend Business of Software at a 50% discount to the current price – prices rise as we get closer to the event.

We have 20 places available.

You qualify if you:

• Are attending Business of Software for the first time.
• Have been incorporated since October 1st 2011.
• Really want to join our amazing community of software people.
• Are FULLY committed to the startup – it must be your primary job – not a side project, a full-on, full-time gig.

Use the DISCOUNT CODE – Startup50 when you register – this link takes you straight to the discount registration.

If you have any doubt about whether you meet the criteria to qualify, please contact us directly to check.

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This is a guest post from Jonathan Alexander. Jonathan is VP Engineering at Vocalocity.  He is the author of Codermetrics: Analytics for Improving Software Teams published by O’Reilly in 2011.

Jonathan’s guest post is on adapting honest, self-evaluation to measure your team.

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In the new book How Will You Measure Your Life? Clayton Christensen and his co-authors explain ways to measure whether we are on track for a happy and fulfilling life.  Using the methodology from Professor Christensen’s Harvard business school class, the book offers a set of questions and viewpoints that each person can apply independently to assess his or her life.  A key premise is that people get off track because they fail to evaluate themselves.

For those of us who work in teams, a similar problem exists.  By not identifying or evaluating the factors that make teams successful, we increase the likelihood that our teams will fail.

When someone suggests measuring teams, however, people’s eyes glaze over with thoughts of bureaucratic complexity.  It sounds like something we won’t like and don’t have time for.  But there is an easy way to measure teams based on a simple lesson from Christensen’s book:  honest self-evaluation is a powerful and accurate measurement technique.  The following outlines a simple way to apply this lesson to help your team navigate towards greater success.

LET YOUR TEAM MEASURE ITSELF

This exercise has three simple steps and for any small or modest-sized team can most likely be done in a one-hour meeting.  It’s ideal if your meeting room has a whiteboard or a projector, but if you don’t have these then just a laptop will suffice.  You’ll need a blank piece of paper for every team member, and pens or pencils.

STEP ONE:  BRAINSTORM THE QUALITIES NEEDED FOR SUCCESS

The first step is to determine what are the key factors that can or will make your team successful.  You can treat this as a brainstorming session, with an assigned scribe taking notes on the whiteboard or your laptop.  For each part of the brainstorming activity, you can use the “popcorn” method to determine when the brainstorming is done: as long as the ideas are coming quickly like kernels of corn rapidly popping, keep going, but when the pace slows down noticeably then you can move on.

Start by asking team members to share ideas of what “success” means for the team.  Of course this will differ based on the type of team.  For example, engineering teams will have different goals than marketing teams.  Encourage the team to not only think about business goals but also their own personal goals.  Also, consider both short-term and longer-term goals.  So the list might include tangible targets like new customers or revenues or reduced quality problems, but also intangibles like having a fun workplace or continued education and career growth.

Once you have captured a list of ideas about what team success means and listed them on the whiteboard or projector, continue the brainstorming session by asking team members to identify individual qualities that are required to achieve the kinds of success listed.  The scribe can write these down in a separate area, maybe next to or below the previous list.  The new list might include a wide variety of qualities like effort, accuracy, communication, teamwork, mentoring, or poise under pressure.

The final part of the brainstorming is to determine which are the most important qualities among those listed.  To do this, ask team members to vote by a show of hands for their top three or four qualities, and tally the results.  Use the results to narrow down the list to those receiving the most votes.  As a general guideline the “top list” should include at least three qualities, but for this exercise it is probably good if it includes at least five and maybe even more based on the voting and your judgement.

STEP TWO:  LET INDIVIDUALS RATE THEMSELVES

At the end of step one you will have a team-identified top list of individual qualities that drive team success.  Now you are ready to move to the second step.

Ask every team member to take a piece of paper and write down the top list of qualities that you as a group have agreed upon.  Then ask each person to rate themselves on a scale of 1 to 5 (1 being “poor” and 5 being “excellent”) for each of those qualities.  Names should not be written down; the ratings are anonymous in order to encourage everyone to provide an honest self-evaluation with no fear of judgement or repercussions.

After everyone has rated themselves for each quality, ask them to identify the quality which is their strongest and the quality which is their weakest.  This may be difficult, since many people will see themselves as equal in various qualities, but ask everyone to choose.  They can identify these on the paper with plus and minus signs next to their strongest and weakest qualities.

You might wonder whether this self-rating system is “valid” and “fair” since you don’t know that people rate themselves with equal severity.  But the usefulness of these ratings isn’t the exact numbers, but the relative differences they reveal.  For example, if one person rates herself 5-4-3 for three qualities and another rates herself 4-3-2, it’s not important whether the first person is actually “better” in any of the qualities than the second.  What’s important is that they both rated themselves stronger for the first quality and weaker for the last.  As long as people’s rating scales are “consistent” for themselves, which we can reasonably assume will be the case, then the self-rating technique is useful.

STEP THREE:  USE SELF-RATINGS TO IDENTIFY THE TEAM’S STRENGTHS AND WEAKNESSES

The third and final step of the team meeting is to collect the individual papers and calculate the results.  Using the whiteboard or a simple spreadsheet, you can calculate two numbers for each of the key qualities that your team identified as important to team success:

• Team Average:  sum the ratings (1 to 5) that individuals gave themselves for each quality and then divide by the number of team members to get the average
• Plus-Minus:  count the number of individuals that rated themselves strongest for each quality and then subtract from that the number of individuals who rated themselves the weakest for that quality (result may be positive, zero, or negative number)

When complete, for every quality you will have a Team Average and a Plus-Minus.  The qualities with higher numbers are the team’s self-identified strengths, and the qualities with the lower numbers are the team’s self-identified weaknesses.  The actual numbers themselves aren’t really important or meaningful, but the relative differences are, especially if there are big differences for one or more qualities.

APPLY WHAT YOU LEARN

How is this useful?  First of all, the process and results may spur useful conversation and self-reflection among team members.  Thinking about what success means, what it takes, and how each person is contributing may cause team members to think more about how they can improve.  You might, for example, finish the meeting by discussing what the team can do to strengthen areas that you identified as weakest.

Team managers might also reflect on this information afterwards to find ways to strengthen the team.  For example, if the team identified communication as one of its weaker qualities, you could think about improving opportunities for interaction (such as team lunches or other informal gatherings).  The balance of strengths and weaknesses might also influence the type of mentoring or training you pursue, or the type of people that you seek to add to the team.

If you already have an annual performance review process, you may already be capturing self-rating data similar to this, and you might get similar benefits from cumulative analysis of those results.  But if you don’t already have such a process, or even as an extra exercise to facilitate team-building, a session of honest self-evaluation can be as worthwhile and healthy for any team as it can be for every individual.

Jason Cohen, Naked Businesses: How I made more money through honesty than through typical business behaviour.

Deceit infests business: salesmen decieve, PR spins, tech support deflects, marketers mislead, strategists out-wit, founders preen. Entrepreneurs mislead to seem big and stable; multi-nationals mislead to seem relatable and human. It’s the game.

“But what happens when you don’t play along? I’ve found something surprising after 12 years of building four companies from scratch: That honesty is more profitable than deceit. Not because it’s ethical (though it is), but because it’s more effective. Turns out that doing the right thing is just good business.”

Jason is the founder of Smart Bear Software and author of Best Kept Secrets of Peer Code Review. He blogs weekly on startups and marketing from a geek’s point of view at http://blog.asmartbear.com/jason-cohen.

This is Jason’s talk at Business of Software 2011.

Watch the video or read the full transcript of the talk.

I was, uh, I was talking to Mark last night and complaining that I had to go after Clayton, like this is going to be a hard act to follow. And last year I had to anchor the first day, which is also hard because it was kicked off by Seth Godin and then there was Eric Ries, and a huge day like this. I mean, we’re only an hour and a half in to this whole day. I imagine a lot of people are already starting to get fatigued with ideas, right?

Also, I was the last thing preventing people from drinking beer, which was going to be provided for FREE, so that was harsh.

So I was kind of complaining, then I realized that there is no good slot- when is the good slot to speak? After lunch when people are tired, there’s always a presenter before and after both, so there’s just no good slot to speak, I think. Why not me?

So I’m going to talk about honesty, because I think not many people do. And I want to start with Smucker’s. This is Smucker’s “Simply 100% Fruit” line.

And this is strawberry as you can see. Any guesses at to how much of this can, what percent of this can, is strawberries? Yeah, it’s 30! That’s right, whoever said that. 30% of this is actually strawberries. And the rest is stuff like apple juice, lemon juice, pectin, and then because that stuff doesn’t taste like strawberries they have to add “natural flavors,” right? And when a consumer advocacy group challenged them on this, they said, “Well, you see where it says spreadable fruit there? Well, it has to be at least half preserves or it won’t be spreadable.” Like that’s some kind of explanation for this. Anybody here surprised, like shocked or dismayed at this? Like, “[gasp] I cannot believe it!” Nobody. And you’re not surprised because I think lying is normal and expected in business. It’s expected in sale’s calls, marketing, packaging, your product page, “About Us,” negotiations, deal-making, kind of everything, I think. It’s expected, and accepted, that you lie. And what I want to talk about for the next hour is not whether that’s ethical, I don’t care. I want to talk about, does it make you more money? When does honesty, or lack of honesty, make you more money?

What do all these countries have in common? [Sign: Republic of Cuba, People’s Republic of China, Lao People’s Democratic Republic, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea] [laughter] NONE of them are republic, none of them are democratic, none of them are run by the people, right? Yet there it is. Sort of like simply 100% fruit. I think, uh, this is especially interesting to me because it doesn’t work. Everyone just laughed. I mean, no one here, like if you didn’t believe that the 100% fruit had fruit you certainly don’t believe that North Korea is a republic, right? So it obviously does not work.

So what does it do? All it does is establish that they will lie about even obvious things. Right? They’ve just destroyed any possibility of trust, to NO benefit at all. And it’s easy to laugh at it, but I contend that a lot of the stuff, again, that you say on Twitter, that’s on your home page, that’s in your marketing material, that’s in your product description, is exactly the same. Almost no benefit, very transparent, probably hurting you.

So for example, here’s a website, very typical website. They are the “leading provider of internet marketing solutions.” Leading! This is it! This is the top. And you can tell, I mean, look at that website, it looks cutting edge in this field of internet marketing, does it not? [laughter] Yeah, okay, it wasn’t changed since 2002, that’s okay! I’m sure internet marketing hasn’t changed a lot since then, it’s all right. To me this is like the People’s Republic. It’s just not true. But again, I don’t really care about the fact that they’re spinning or exaggerating, I really want to ask, does this make them more money? Would they make more money if they said something else, or is this actually a good technique?