High performance teams

Team performance stages

The difference between top performing team and a so-so team are appalling.

Saying this is quite easy and one can read about it in the literature (see Wikipedia article).

However building a team and ensuring that this happens is quite a challenge and it is a lot more related to the personalities of the team members and team leaders than it is to simply applying a formula or recipe.

My team at FeedZai is now performing as a fine tuned machine and the results it delivers are simply impressive. I leave you with a video of the surprise they have made to me on Friday.

Reading of the week

Word of Mouth Marketing

The reading of the week goes to Word Of Mouth Marketing by Andy Sernovitz.

For someone building a company from scratch, as I am with Feedzai,  where resources are scarce this is the main if not only source of advertising you have at your disposal.The holy grail of marketing is that your users/customers act as your main source of publicity and that they tell their friends or customers/partners how great you and whatever your are selling are.

If you are in the same situation go and read the book as there are many easy to use techniques that you can apply the next day.

Pile of books

While I await for my ipad to arrive from its world wide tour event (San Francisco to Sidney to London to Lisbon) I have to resort to reading hard copies versions of books. Below is a short list for this week, courtesy of LQ, @loic (from Seesmic) and the 451group @caos.

- If you are out there raising money better read this Harvard Business Review article as it gives you some insight into how VC´s reason. How Venture Capitalists Evaluate Potential Venture Opportunities

- Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us - Seth Godin

- Trust Agents by Chris Brogan

- Engage! by Brian Solis

- Rework by Jason Fried & David Hansson of 37 Signals

On the Open Source front reading, the following reads are quite interesting: