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Showing posts from November, 2006

Business growth and preservation of quality

Today, I realized one of the key challenges facing small business: growing while preserving the quality of service. For a business selling goods, there's mass production: leave it to the machines. But in the service industries which still require high levels of skill, this is a little trickier. It's something we've still got to figure out. I thought of this today as I went to see Douglas, a mechanic friend of my dad. He's a good mechanic, and he set up shop for himself in Mountain View a couple of years ago. My family goes to him every time we want to fix our cars — not only because he's my dad's friend, but because he doesn't charge through the roof, because he won't charge for trivial things, and because he does a thorough job. His customers have been known to bring him pizza and other treats out of gratitude. Every time I go to his shop, all the bays are full, with several cars queued up waiting for each bay. I asked him if he ever thought about putti

The beautiful side of arguing

There are many reasons why I prefer not to argue with people. The two biggest reasons for me are that I don't want to waste my time, and I prefer not to rock the boat by creating personal unpleasantness. After thinking about it, though, I've decided that it's good to argue. As someone who has worked well on my own for a long time, I'm finding that working closely with a team and putting myself in a leadership role requires that I look beyond my personal productivity and look at how to build up the team. By avoiding arguments, I save myself time from explaining myself, but alienate the rest of the team by not involving them in my thought process. In economic terms, they are forced to operate on imperfect information--and the fault of this lies squarely with me because I have an aversion to heated arguments. Because I don't take the time to argue, I also force myself to operate on imperfect information. Yes, the argument can be unpleasant, but when people listen, it a