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August 30, 2005
The "Kobe" Theory.
I'm a big proponent of team work. A team to me is at least 2 people working together on a common goal. That doesn't mean that there is no room for the single "star", but these "stars" are usually more like shooting stars that flare up for a while and rock your world before they disappear. Great teams, however, by the simple concept of redundancy, have a much better shot at lasting success. In light of this I thought I share the following with you.
Yesterday I’ve had a weird conversion over lunch with one of the people that work for me at Globat. While no laws were broken ;-) I decided to name him Jack for good measure and leave his real first name out of this post.
Jack’s been working for Globat in a technical capacity for about 6 months now and last week he approached me with what he considered to be a “really great idea to drive additional sales” out of our already pretty successful affiliate program (we currently have about 12,000+ affiliates). So I took him out to lunch today to see what he came up with.
I won’t get into the details of his idea as it’s as irrelevant to this post as his real name, but while his “invention” has some interesting aspects I seriously doubt that it would have a significant enough impact to justify a considerable amount of development work, and I told him so.
What “bugged” me about the entire conversation and situation overall was the fact that he told me that he developed and implemented this idea in his prior company (which potentially means that his great idea is that other companies intellectual property. Additionally, he told me that this time around he “wanted to be part of it” should we decide to implement his idea. I was caught a bit by surprise with this request (his promotional idea really wasn’t that big a deal), because Globat as well has a pretty tight intellectual property agreement with all its employees.
I look at this, of course, with my CEO had on. If you work for a company than the company pays you for your talent, ingenuity, and to help making that company stronger, more competitive, and a better place to work. Everybody in a company has a part in making what they work on, alone or in a team, a success. I don’t see why I would agree to something where we single out someone from that general idea of teamwork. I am a strong believe in rewards, so I would certainly bonus someone for awesome ideas. However, although it might end up in the same wallet, there is a huge difference between goodwill rewards and demanded compensation. I was surprised by the request because I was and still am (kind of) under the impression that Jack considered himself part of the team.
I guess I write this up as a good example of why it is worth to continue my search for people that love to be part of something a group creates instead of being the Kobe’s of a basketball team.
Posted by Ben at August 30, 2005 09:41 AM
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