Joey Skinner’s presentation was exceptionally interesting. Initially he talked a little about himself and his career. He talked about what he does now which is consulting for software companies. Then he spent the brunt of his presentation talking about a pattern of success to failure that he saw in different software companies that he called the Immaturity Cycle.
The Immaturity Cycle is what he said most businesses go through when they go from being startup businesses to being more stable to then going into a sharp decline. It starts with the business seeing success. They are hard working and excited. They are generally happy and they over commit to their investors. The cycle peaks and starts to decline when the business gets prideful. There starts to be a general attitude of “I shouldn’t have to do that” and the company divides things up into responsibilities. They try to innovate when it is not needed. This process of division continues until they start to see a sharp decline in success. They continue reorganizing the company. On that note, Skinner seemed to be very against re-organizing and dividing the company saying that people put too much emphasis on organizational charts. One of the key signs he gave of a company in that declining situation is that the developers will start to blame the customers. He then emphasized the point that the customers are the ones who bring money into the company. He talked about how getting out of this cycle involves very strong leadership and heavy communication between stations.
The pattern he discussed was very interesting to me because it was very true to life not only with computer businesses I have observed but also with private businesses that I have worked for and observed. This pattern is more of a principal that can be applied to more aspects of life than just software development for startup businesses.
As he was speaking, I distinctly recognized the pattern of failure with one of my old work places. It was privately owned retail store that was having some success in one of it’s locations. In an effort to make more money. The manager and owners decided it would be prudent to move to a cheaper location. They did this and it hurt their cash flow. They then decided to fix it by opening up two more stores, which also failed and cost them more money. They would complain about customers and not take the blame for the decline in business. They ended up going out of business, but the pattern was very much the same.
I would like to use the point from this to replace the point I porbably lost on case 6 D
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