

Ask HN: How do you beat complacency? - c1sc0

Maybe some of you know the feeling: you finished a big projects, it takes off, has some success &#38; then comes the big void ... what next? It's easy to slip into complacency, taking it easy. Is this typical for hackers? What do <i>you</i> do about it? What can an <i>organization</i> do about it?<p>I've observed this in myself several times &#38; now I observe it in the group of people I'm working with. I'm at a medium-sized internet company with about 100 employees. We're doing fine: fast growth, good revenue, great colleagues, life is beautiful. But complacency is creeping in, and I see many symptoms of that: "We have too many projects!", "We need to hire more people!", "Why do something new when we have so much unfinished business?", "We need more structures!", "We need more layers of responsibility!", "We should only do projects that can't fail".<p>I'm in a position where I can hopefully nudge this group of people in the right direction, so which suggestions do you have? Has anyone tried the Google 20% approach? Does that work? How do you launch the notion of "Fail often, fail early" in a rapidly growing organization? I'm struggling with fostering innovation in this environment. Ideas?
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sharpn
Run an internal competition (with a significant prize) to come up with a
product that would outdo the existing product. Assuming the winning idea is
good enough, that becomes the template for version 2.0

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c1sc0
That's a great idea, we contemplated participating in some external
competitions (e.g. Android challenge) but I like the idea of an internal "Kill
The Company" contest.

