The Counterfeiters and What It Takes to be a Great Technical Leader

Counterfeiters is a film centered around a Jewish counterfeiter, Salomon 'Sally' Sorowitsch, who is coerced into assisting the Nazis during World War II to execute Operation Bernhard, a secret plan to destabilize the United Kingdom by flooding its economy with forged Bank of England currency. It won the Oscar for the best foreign language film.

As I watched it, I realized that Sally epitomizes the ideal Technical Leader every startup can’t live without. Here is why:

1. Reputation – everyone in the counterfeiting world knew who Sally was and that he was the best – that enabled him to be perceived as a leader by his team. We don’t need a brand name all the time, but following a great leader is easier than an unproven one.
2. Technical Abilities and Skills – Sally had both the technical skills to counterfeit and the know how to solve unprecedented technical problems when others couldn’t (or wouldn’t for moral reasons as was the case in the movie). In a startup when the organization is more flat than vertical, the leader needs to know how to roll up their sleeves and start coding like the rest of the team.
3. Team Player – Sally never betrays his team members (even the ones that refused to collaborate with the Nazis and were sabotaging the project) and subsequently the rest of the team had more respect for him and followed his lead.
4. Understanding of Social Structure – when Sally lands in a concentration camp, he pulls aside the Capo – the leader of the block, and threatens him. Instantly, he gains respect without the Capo loosing face. Sally knows enough about social structure to do that and do it immediately – otherwise he may be killed. A good Technical Leader knows how to navigate the politics of the company and shape an environment in which they will succeed.
5. Upward Mobility – Sally quickly realizes that in a concentration camp playing by the rules results in death. So, in an effort to secure himself protection at the camp, he turns his forging skills to portraiture, attracting the attention of the guards and subsequently the camp commander, who commission him to paint them and their families. The key however was the first picture he makes, one of Nazi soldier that he hangs on the door for the guards to see. He makes it at night in between excruciating day labor, with frozen hands, and one pencil. Oftentimes the Technical Lead may find themselves coding to death while the organization grows, and the Technical Lead is seen more and more as a programmer and not a Leader. Having the Upward Mobility instinct motivated the person to work at night to show the upper management that they are different from the rest and have what it takes to Lead.
6. Survival Mode – the fact that Sally was in a concentration camp helped him make better decisions, if he didn’t he would have been killed. A good Technical Leader understands that the company is in survival mode and his decision can mean the difference between a financially viable business model and one that isn’t.

There is only one thing that this type of person lacks that makes him a Technical Leader and not a CEO of the company: a great vision. Sally was perfectly content forging small bills and living it up during the war. It was the Nazis that brought the vision of destabilizing British economy through counterfeiting to him. Of course they coursed Sally into participating, but in some sense the good CEO does the same. A good CEO offers the Technical Leader an opportunity to partake in a grand vision that the Technical Leader would not have the resources to do alone.

Thinking Big

I have great respect for Aaron Patzer and the courage with which he walled himself up for seven months and built a platform that took on and beat Intuit and Microsoft. For me, Aaron is a source of inspiration because he is an entrepreneur who was not afraid of thinking big. The motivation to create Mint.com grew out of a desire to manage his own money with ease. In that quest he solved some of the biggest hurdles to money management, not the least of which was data integration.

When I learned about Aaron’s story, I instantly tried to put myself in his shoes. They are a bit big, and after some reflection I realized why. My motivation to become an entrepreneur came from egoism: I enjoy giving myself orders more than taking them from others. I also enjoy being responsible for my success and accountable for my failure. But mostly, I knew a few people who were successful entrepreneurs, and I thought since I was no worse than them, I could be one too. The problem with that thinking is that it led me to build a run-of-the-mill consulting business, when what I wanted to create was a business that ranks among the best in the world. What I realize now, is that I can’t build a great business until I take on a challenge that is not only personal to me, but one that is big as well.

I recently met another entrepreneur, Glen Laughton, who founded SynergyConscious.com, a company that gives people the ability to measure and reduce energy consumption. When I asked him why he started the business his answer fascinated me. He told me to imagine a gravestone that instead of an epitaph had a counter that constantly increased with the number of kilowatts that were saved through use of his software. That is a powerful legacy and I wish him the best of luck in making it happen.

Get Defiant!

Defiant! is an e-book authored by Rajesh Setty filled with practical tips of what you need to do in order to thrive in tough times. As you may have guessed it will not only put your mind at ease if you are worried about losing your job, but give you actionable advice that will help you either secure the job you have or find a better opportunity in no time.

The interesting part about Defiant! is not only how practical and easy to read it is, but that it was written with the contribution of 50+ people including Seth Godin, Mark McGuinness, Phil Gerbyshak, and this humble entrepreneur.

Defiant! is being given away for free, so please download your own copy and spread the word.

Six Existential Affirmations

Recently, I have read "The Courage to Be" by Paul Tillich, a German born theologian and philosopher. The book is basically a two hundred page survey of existential dilemmas that plagued western society from its Greek origin to our time. It also explores how various philosophies and religious systems addressed those fears. The three basic fears Tillich identified are:

• Fear of death: it is a rather subtle fear that is inherent in everything we do as human beings whether conscious or not. The fear of death also implies the fear of our fate – not being able to identify what our fate is or not being able to fulfill it. In other words our fear of death creates an even greater fear of life.
• Fear of meaninglessness: this is the fear that forms the basis of most modern existential dilemmas. We all want to live a life full of meaning. After all if there is no point to life, what is the point of living? So we fear never discovering our purpose, our convictions, and our values.
• Fear of condemnation: not quite the fear of being condemned for our sins, but a deep rooted fear that we are condemned to lead a meaningless life that will culminate in death. In this fear lies the fear to affirm ourselves, our fate, and our purpose.

I’ve spent the last month thinking about the three basic fears. I have experienced them all quite acutely within the past few years from imagining my death to crawling under a blanket during the day and not knowing why I am alive and what to do with myself. After reading Tillich's book, I realized that I needed to create my own set of affirmation to help me control and accept these fears. I wanted to share them here:

1. Death is the greatest incentive for us to make the most of our life. When we are afraid of death it is a subtle reminder that we are afraid of life and that we are not living to our full potential. We are not afraid of death. We affirm death is a natural part of life.
2. Our fate is our choosing. We affirm the responsibility of determining what our fate is, the ability to make choices, to make mistakes, to correct them. The worst choice we can make is to allow ourselves to be afraid to choose.
3. The meaning of our life is waiting to be defined. It can be defined only by us.
4. We are not empty. The universe is too abundant for us not to be able to fill ourselves with meaning.
5. We are blessed to be alive. Life is not a condemnation or a curse but an opportunity to create meaning and shape our fate.
6. We affirm ourselves, our fate, our passions, our convictions, our values – the meaning and the person we create.

I invite everyone to write out their own set of affirmations and reread them often. Please send them to me or post them here. I think we would all be inspired by them.

Career Planner

As mentioned in the previous blog entry, while I was trying to develop a personal brand I realized that I cannot do it without first understanding the larger missions I want to accomplish in life. A personal brand is fluid; it starts in one place and evolves – so it is imperative for us to know where we are going as well as to take stock of the tools we have in our backpack that will help us get there. Tools may be the wrong word – I prefer to call them passions because often times our true passions are developed into our strongest skills or tools we have at our disposal.

To help everyone identify the passions and mission we care about, I am working on a tool to make the process a little more seamless and intuitive. In this blog I wanted to share the first take with a dual purpose of helping people who are asking themselves the same questions I am as well as gathering feedback on how to make this tool more useful. The goal of this tool is to enable people to leverage all their passions and skills to help fulfill all the missions and causes they care about in life. In order to do that, the tool will ask you to take stock of your past accomplishments, current opportunities, obstacles, your personal network, as well as identify and create plans for next-step initiatives all in terms of your passions and life missions.

The link to the tool is here: http://www.slideshare.net/borisglants/career-planner

There are some specific questions I am looking to answer and would very much appreciate your feedback.

• Is it a valid assumption to say that our deepest fulfillment can occur when we are able to leverage all our passions to fulfill all our missions?
• To whom can this tool provide the most benefit? Under what circumstance?
• What improvements to layout and flow would you suggest to make it better?
• What content would you add/take away from the tool to make it better?

Everyone, thanks again for your support!

Building a Personal Brand

Recently, I've spent a lot of time thinking about the meaning I want to create with my life. It was mostly an introspective process as ultimately I am the one who will decide if I made the right choices and to what degree I was able to succeed. Along the way I've gotten a lot of help from mentors and friends. This past week I've spent my time thinking about my personal brand and ended up asking Rajesh Setty for advice through his new Thinksulting blog. You can read the complete question and answer that Rajesh provides on the link below:

http://www.thinksulting.com/how-do-i-approach-building-a-personal-brand-w

After thinking about what Rajesh suggested, I realized that I need to identify one key strength/passion that is related to a skill through which I can view the world and pursue the rest of my interests. What I mean is that if I am passionate about computer programming, I can use that as a leans through which I can view and involve myself with the rest of the world. With programming I can be involved in non profit work, in medical industry, etc. As an example, my good friend Robert Henderson is getting a PHD in linguistics. Through his passion for linguistics, he co-founded Wuqu' Kawoq, a nonprofit that runs medical clinics in Kachikel (Mayan) and supports indigenous practitioners such as midwifes. This project not only helps Robert with his own research of Kachikel, but gives something back to the community that is far more valuable by changing the culture of Guatemalan healthcare. I look at Robert and in my mind he exemplifies the perfect way to slowly and intentionally build an organic personal brand that is rooted in one singular but ever-expanding interest.

To help myself and others figure out exactly how to structure my own personal brand I am refashioning a strategic accounts planning tool into a personal brand planning tool. In particular I am fascinated by the idea of creating a matrix to plot personal passions/skills vs. life missions/causes, to help people better understand where their foundation of work experience lies and how they can leverage it to fulfill all their life's missions or strengthen their passions and skills for missions where they are already strong. I expect to finish this tool sometime next week and post it on my blog to get feedback on how to make it better. Look out for it in the coming week!

The Call of Duty

Over the past three years, during many prolonged conversation with my friends the topic of starting a business invariably came up. Most of them had a few ideas they had been thinking about. I always asked what prevents them from going forward and executing them. The answers I got were variants of "I am afraid of failure" to which I invariable gave the same advice I had been given that helped me get started:

• It is better to fail than to regret that you have never tried to succeed
• Collect 6 months of cash in the bank, set a 4 month financial goal and go for it; evaluate where you are in 4 months, then either stick with the business or find a regular job

Despite the fact that this advice has helped me, it failed to move most of the people I have talked to. There was something missing in that recipe and I could not figure out what.

For the past six months as I have been exploring what business I want to be involved in, I have evaluated dozens of opportunities some originated by my unimaginative brain as well as others thought through by seasoned businesspeople I have met. There were some brilliant opportunities on the table that I invariably passed up or thought I wanted to be involved in and just failed to "show up" for. The reason why was simple – I did not care about the problems the businesses were designed to solve.

Two weeks ago during another one of those conversations with one of my friends, the "I want to start a business" line came up, shortly followed by the "I am afraid of failure" line. Instead of giving my caned advice as usual, I told my friend a story that I would like to share:

Both my grandparents fought in World War II in the Soviet Armed Forces. Miraculously they survived. And I say miraculously because they were the ones that thought it was a miracle. Neither one of them expected to live through the ordeal. When they first told me at a very early age that they both thought they would surely be killed in the war when they were drafted, my immediate response was, "Then why did you go?" Their answer was comprised of one word: "Duty."

To this day I am completely in awe of that one word that conveyed to me the feeling that there was something out there in life more important than life itself, something worth fighting for, something worth dying for. Later, in America, I would learn the words: "Liberty or Death!" and remember what my grandfathers had told me.

Yet, my grandfathers were not courageous men. They did nothing extraordinary with their lives. But they were not cowards either. They did not shirk their duty, try to blow of their toes to be discharged from the front, but instead ingested their daily ration of 100 milliliters of vodka and kept "showing up" to the battled. They were no different from most people who wake up and go to work every day because they have to, because it is their duty. What was different about them was the circumstance they had found themselves in. Objectively speaking, what they did was heroic by every sense of the word – for four years they risked their lives for an ideal – they believe the world would be a safer place for their children without the Nazis.

Now what does that have to do with starting a business?

Simply put, the easiest way to overcome our natural fear of failure which is akin to our fear of death is by finding our call of duty, our mission that we feel is so important to complete that we are willing to risk our lives for it. The businesses that we start better fulfill that mission.