Comments on: Startup Ethics: Albatross or Essential?

By: drllau

drllau — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 06:15:20 +0000

I’ve commented elsewhere on the distinction between benchmarking (objective 3rd party), benchcrafting (selective subset – app specific) and benchmarketing (simplistic overeliance on blunt metrics such as MHz speed). Benchcrafting can be interpreted both in good and bad light, It requires some skill and insight … for example in HPCC there are the LinPack kernels which measures raw speed, but there are also real computationlal physics codes from the TriLabs. Selective omission and or overemphasis is starting to blur the line though.

By: Business Ethics Training

Business Ethics Training — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 01:39:35 +0000

For all of you who are supervisors and managers who may be reading this: It is not only important to do things right, but it is important to make sure that the right thing is done right.

By: Maurice Karnaugh

Maurice Karnaugh — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 01:39:58 +0000

I’m with you on ethics but with a caveat: people do cheat with predictable regularity. Much of the ad biz is a cheat, although I am fond of the GEICO gekko.

In the early days of my IBM employment there were a couple of internal jokes. Probably, you have heard them.

1) “Ship it; we’ll fix it in the field.”

2) The sad story of the IBM salesman whose marriage never got consummated on his honeymoon. According to his widow, “he just sat on the side of the bed telling me how good it will be.”

By: Startup Ethics: Albatross or Essential? « Steve Blank « Ethics

Startup Ethics: Albatross or Essential? « Steve Blank « Ethics — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 12:29:57 +0000

[...] Here is the original: Startup Ethics: Albatross or Esse&… [...]

By: William Pietri

William Pietri — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 22:56:47 +0000

Well put.

I teach teams various Agile techniques, and occasionally get told some particular trick is cheating. E.g., we take a big spec, cut the 80% that, for some core group of customers, is nice rather than necessary, and ship the 20% ASAP. Shipping 8 months early, with only half a product! That’s cheating!

Compared to what they were planning to do, or to what a competitor will do, it can look that way. But for the people who buy it and get what they need sooner, it’s not cheating at all. I say that cheating reality or common practice on behalf of the customer is exactly what startups are for.

Your Potrero benchmarks are a great example of that:. You folks may or may not have been able to beat the competition in academic hardware design, but your customers didn’t care about polygons per second, they cared about getting work done. Changing the game your industry is playing to one that better serves the customer is the kind of cheating I’m entirely in favor of.

By: brantcooper

brantcooper — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 22:20:47 +0000

Thanks for that. I would have been surprised if this weren’t your position. But the manner in which you described the tests was to the say the least, ambiguous.

Also, I phrased my question the way I did purposefully, since the ethical line isn’t always clear. One might omit, for example, “less important” tests where one hadn’t performed as well, without crossing an ethical boundary.

By: Luke G

Luke G — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 22:01:01 +0000

Nice post, Steve. I think this addresses a significant piece of what came up in the brief discussion of “social ventures” at the beginning of last week’s class. A major pillar behind the ideas of “doing well by doing good” is that operating a business in ethical, honest and even transparent fashion creates (marginal) value in the long term.

An example that will probably come up in their presentation/discussion next week is the adoption of “zero waste” policies or goals by decidedly competitive companies like Walmart and Nike (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_waste). It’s not the implementation of environmental policy for the sake of the environment, but rather that there seems to be a growing belief that environmentally-responsible and human-centric business practices lead to less waste, higher productivity, and more competitive businesses.

Or at least that’s how I understand it.