Take Extreme Measures to Bring In Fresh Perspectives
Fresh perspectives bring in newer ideas, provide room for growth, help solve exiting issues, and often break long built monotony and boredom in almost all disciplines. The ways through which newer perspectives are fostered need to be creative yet simple to bring in effective results.
Software engineering is a fast-paced, resource-constrained area of work, yet often it is very embracing of newer ideas, thoughts, and techniques. The research and development group is one that is typically dedicated to help trigger and drive innovation and help an organization retain its technical edge.
At a core hiring level, companies want to keep their pipeline active by hiring from campuses each year because freshers help bring a fresh perspective to the organization. At the same time, at a simplistic, operational level, cross team collaboration is a great way to bring in newer perspectives. Developers working closely with testers, reviewing their results and processes, and vice versa is a very simple yet powerful example of trying to bring in a fresh perspective in a tactical way.
Teams bring in people external to their core areas of operations—be it end users, people from other teams, or usability experts—to share their varied perspectives on the product being developed with the goal of building a holistic and rich experience when the product is released to the market.
Beyond such tactical measures, companies are attempting newer techniques to stay competitive and maximize their efficiency—even if it means that such techniques can be high risk and high visibility in nature. One such technique is being used by two companies, SEER and Moz. They recently announced that their CEOs will swap roles for five days in October 2013.
They will manage each other’s emails, blogs, employee interaction, and overall company management—stepping into each other’s shoes for one full working week. This is an almost unheard of idea that is being attempted at the highest role in an organization. That said, one must applaud the effort by these executives and the challenge they are taking on in a diligently thought out approach to bring a fresh perspective to each other’s business.
It is interesting that they are public about this swap, as certain companies that tried this in the past decided to keep their identity secret. They have clearly defined areas of do’s and don’ts to make this swap successfully realize its goal, while not impacting the organization’s overall operational sanity, including not making any business impacting decisions, being able to reach each other in extremely compelling situations, etc.
Startups often tend to be a zone where there is flexibility for adopting creative practices, and it is heartening to see this move by these companies, which will hopefully set a positive precedence for other organizations. It will be exciting to see the outcome of this CEO-swap come October 2013.
