Ben Young wrote an article which appeared in today’s Herald entitled “The 12 Hour Startup“. Essentially, it promoted taking time out of working in your business, to spend time working on your business… and it attracted an interestingly one sided range of responses.

I was so disappointed in the views which were pitched in response, that I felt compelled to try and answer some of the commenters and provide a little balance. My response is copied below:

It’s with some hilarity that I am reading the comments on this article – the vitriol is palatable and the underlying understanding is verging on infinitesimal. There was so much negativity that I felt compelled to post something myself in the interests of balance.
@Ben10
1 – No, a decent IT department will appreciate that Facebook and it’s ilk are part of what Gen Y employees expect to be able to do, it’s where they connect with others and how they gain feedback for issues that they may well be trying to solve for their employer. If you truly believe that full control over what employees do on the web is possible while still retaining employee goodwill, then you may need to realign your naivety.
2 – So, if your company cannot sustain 12 hours a month, how about a quarter – I don’t believe the time frames were prescriptive, feel free to adjust to what suits your business. Your risk tolerance may be too low for significant change – that may suit your business if you are not seeking to change anything, but those who DO change and invest in a culture where change is both welcomed and expected will be better suited to adapt to an increasingly agile market. You may find this article helpful.
3 – Another all too common mistake. You confuse management with leadership. They ARE different things and your hierarchical world view is sadly showing.

@internet biz guy
Again I’d challenge your assertion this is ‘bogus’. Great ideas come from such brainstorming and the medici effect of gathering ideas from a wide range of sources (and levels of employees, to reinforce the counter to @ben10 #3) has been around since the 15th century, far be it for someone *young* to dare to reassert such thinking! As for a bio, I used Google and some other online resources to find out about the author.. surely as an internet biz guy you did the same?

@Derek
A 1:10 ratio of ideas to successful launch is actually quite high, if you’re looking for innovations rather than adjacencies and/or improvements that is. Phil McKinney (innovation lead for a fairly large company) discusses these ratios and strategies at length, if you *are* interested, a good place to start is here

@xavier money
“Employees are by definition not great inventors or entrepreneurs” By whose definition, yours? Are you attracting the right people to your company as employees then? There are very few people who know your products and company capabilities better than your employees and your customers. If you are not prepared to leverage these people as a resource then, well – you may well end up working on the same thing for most of your life. Actual real life entrepreneurs will begin, build and sometimes sell off a large number of businesses in their time. Branson would be a good example of this, a wide range of companies under his tutorship. Steve Jobs would be another who as leveraged adjacencies and diversified, rather than sticking to one idea and focusing on it for a lifetime. I guess peoples measures of success vary.

In the interests of disclosure, I am not *that* young, but I am marginally under 40 – please feel free to use the period of my existence to judge the usefulness of my response if that’s what makes you feel comfortable in your world view.

What I have learned from the experience is there is still a marked lack of confidence in ‘young’ people with ideas, and there is still a lot of traditional thinking out there. It will be interesting to see how the adoption curve plays out for these people.