Year End Big Picture Thinking for Small Developers

I am currently reading  The Advantage by Patrick Lencioni.  Lencioni is the author of Death by Meeting, a favorite of mine. The Advantage is about organizational health, something worth considering for any small developer.

You may have zero employees, but your work will require that you cultivate a real organization to have a stable enterprise. The organization may be populated by freelancers, brokers, consultants, architects, engineers, property managers, building trades, and investors, but you will need to built that organization/network intentionally. Building a healthy culture without a lot of drag and friction from dysfunction, politics, low morale, and low productivity is as much of a project as building/rebuilding a neighborhood. I look forward to other folk's impressions of this book. The end of the year is a good time for reflection and big picture thinking.

I spent years in an outfit that started out with just enough structure and systems to design, entitle, engineer and build a cool project or two.  With time, the head of the company figured out that he needed to intentionally build a company with a good culture and good systems/habits that happens to produce cool projects.  The transition was rough, but the lessons of that enterprise, (now dramatically reduced by the Great Recession) have stayed with me as we explore potential business models for Small Developers.

Patrick Lencioni is onto something in focusing this book on organizational health.  This book merits a weekend of reading and big picture thinking.

Lenioni's consulting firm is called the Table Group