I have just seen a tweet from Scott Hanselman about the amazing sarcastic Jon Stewart grilling Apple for their very aggressive move on Jason Chen.

 

I will not talk a lot about it, the fiasco has been already allover the internet. But I want to express about a thought:

 

I never liked Apple. Even before I had a computer, I always see them as arrogant & cocky. Google is being on that thin line between the spirit they’ve started with (Go No Evil) & fall into the arrogance hole, but apple did which is always the beginning of the end. 

 

Apple reminds me somehow with the model of cheerleaders in US high schools. the type who is bitchy to everyone else (friends, geeks, & even teachers).

The question is: Is this really the beginning of the end of Apple’s image as the unique slick stuff who refuse to cooperate with anyone else in the world?

Apple has a very powerful brand, a very loyal & huge users. However, with this kind of exposure, arrogance mistakes like Jason Chen’s will amplify these mistakes & gradually people will let go of apple to a younger, more “good” product.

 

Apple won’t go down in the near future, but making enemies & negative public opinion was never good for any company/person in the history. Microsoft learned the lesson & they’re trying to do good. Apparently Apple still has a way to go in that!

It’s been couple of days & I have been hearing and experiencing the rumors of Skype is not allowed on Egyptians mobile phones anymore!

I have read this article on The Daily News Egypt today & it is confirming that National Telecommunication Regulatory Authority (AKA NTRA) will shutdown Skype on Mobile Phones & Portable mobile internet as well.

 

That sucks! Why would they do that ?

Simple! Telecom Egypt cannot handle the beating it’s taking from Skype. Skype is a young vibrant business that has people working very hard to invent a solution for expensive international phone calls & they succeeded! Now since old heaving slow Telecom Egypt cannot compete with Skype they are forcing the government to ban Skype for their sole benefit!

 

Is this Ethical ?

NO! It is not Ethical to call your big daddy & ask him to help you when you are in a fight. You go in & fight your fight, win or lose with honor.

 

Is this a conflict of interest ?

YES YES YES! NTRA is responsible for supervising, organizing & monitoring the telecommunication in general to ensure smooth operations. It’s not their job to step in, force a decision to save a particular company from being doomed due to its incompetency!

 

“This is not something new, but [mobile providers] weren’t required to enforce it until recently.”

Quoted Khaled Hegazy, external affairs director for Vodafone Egypt. That is correct it is not something new, however, that doesn’t mean it is correct back then! We are trying very hard to get foreign investments into Egypt, that requires very reliable infrastructure to protect your investments. And since Cairo is the most crowded cities in the world, foreigners afraid to drink our tap water and we have a very hot weather, telecommunication is currently the most reliable infrastructure aspect we depend on to bring investments into Egypt.

By banning Skype, NTRA cuts the small & individuals business relations to the outside world. They lose MILLIONS of investment opportunities by banning such technology.

 

Is this good for anyone?!

Besides Phone companies? NO! Most individuals who cannot get around that decision (using proxies & such) to bypass that restriction, will just give up. All young minds full of power will be pushed back with frustration to find something “else” to do.

 

Companies who won’t go around for that, they will use the Telecom Egypt phone lines & start charging that to their customers making them lose one of their most competitive edges, Price! leading them to an unfair comparison with India & China which is not going to end in their favor!

This is not the end of it!

They have also said that other voice over IP technology vendors such as Yahoo & MSN will be banned as well. I guarantee you, this is only a first step to ban Skype on all connections whether it’s a portable, mobile or fixed internet connection you have.

 

Conclusion

NTRA has misused their authorities taking such a “short-sighted” decision protecting an old company & telecommunication giants (who could’ve taken of themselves but they took the easy governmental path) from such a young competitor like Skype.

 

People will learn to go around that banning, no real value will come to anyone. Probably Telecom companies will fall again with battle with another technology instead of doing some heave R&D to save themselves for all the future promising open technologies.

 

Let’s hope such a decision does not stay for long to protect what we’ve been working hard for so long!

So, I was sitting yesterday with DashSoft's General Scrum Master, Ahmed Nasr (AKA Nasr) talking about how can we improve DashSoft even more.

We've had our growth pain. We've grown up 300% the past year and we're still growing. We've learned in the hard way that controlling or should i say "regulating" that growth and preventing it from changing the company culture is even more important.

Actually I learned about the company culture a while ago. I've been talked and learned about by Stephen Forte, Remi Caron and Joel Semeniuk. however, I've never really understood the importance of it until we faced a massive growth in a relatively short period.

Generally, the company culture is a set of values that produce a specific mind set. You can know that you built a good culture in your company when you ask various individuals at your company the same question "What would you do if ...." and you get mostly the same answer. So the answers you get are mostly flowing around a central core. This core is the value that you have built in your company.

So the values could be technical, ethics, or commitment values. They can be a way of treating customers, a way of treating fellow employee, or even a way of treating yourself when you face a challenge and so on.

In order to track your progress of building a culture, you need two things: a set of tools to measure the culture aspects and a set of standards to compare your measurements to.

I am going to demonstrate an example we are doing currently in DashSoft now. 

Interviews

So the first step we did is that we raised our interview levels standard. we become more picky on the ethics aspect more than the technical one. DashSoft is well known with its high technical level, and smart developers would be up to speed in no time.

Defining Culture

You need to define "very" clearly what is your target, you need to show the teams first, the benefits they're going to have when they try to have these values within them, teams believe more in things if they know the reason why.

Start planning a road map

Now everyone is agreed on the What and the Why, we need to agree on the how. Consult your upper management, share your vision and process their feedbacks. Come out from those meetings with a roadmap on how should the company, the management and the teams do in order to have a healthy culture and work environment.

Release a guide on how to improve yourself and doing periodical evaluation meetings with the teams is always a good thing to put them on the right track and everyone makes sure that they're on that track.

Evaluation

Most important part is find a way to "measure" those improvements. So you and your teams can understand if they're working right or not, if not, you'd be able to figure out what's wrong and save yourself lots of time trying to implement a wrong part that potentially would affect the company in a bad way.

Incentives to keep growing

So, yes, you have the teams that willing to do a change, they're smart have high endurance threshold and you can really depend on them to create a solid company. What happens if some bad apples slipped inside ? or people getting lazy ? What's the incentive they would have to start getting up again ? A word I have learned from a dear friend Vassil Terziev a year ago & it's still ringing in my head, "Peer Pressure". Teams should be self sustainable, people are up should help the ones are down. It's not your job to get people up on their feet. It's your job to create the culture that will make everyone feels that its his/her duty to help others.

So beside the guidance and supporting people , everyone will see the "Improvement Progress Chart"

 

Simply it has all the names and all the values we agreed on. each value (V1,V2,...) has a link on how to improve yourself on this specific value along with examples and cases we faced or we would have.

 

Each team member (Name 1, Name 2, ....) has a √ at the values he gets and nothing (-) at the values he does not have it fully yet. The trick is what is the standard you are going to go by that would say from 1-3 is nothing & from 4-5 is something ? It's tricky because you need to realize your team capabilities and you need to understand how far can they endure to be better person. Think of it like a gym. If you are going to train someone, he'd be in pain (good pain) but can he run for 1 hour from the first the first month or day or from the first year.

 

The last part is: if the team member's leader see he should learn something. He would find a message at this specific value he doesn't have yet that is visible only to him telling him how to be better as a tip, that's beside the guide on how to be better on the value that is visible to everyone.

 

One last thing. If you are going through that, you need to have a great faith in your team. I do. I have the reputation of being a tuff person in technical projects management. So whoever can survive me for that long surely he/she is a pretty great person. I have a team of people who can survive me, and I do have the faith in them that they won't let the me down. You need to make sure of that first before going forward with building a culture.

 

I will keep you posted on how this goes.