So after months of planning, over 165 people signing up, the DC Startup Weekend is almost upon us. The final details are being ironed out, location, times, etc. but have no fear, it will go off without a hitch (at least that is the plan). We are starting this Friday night and will finish Sunday night, 11:59 pm come hell or high water.
We are going to be live streaming the event via ustream.tv, so if you are interested in keeping up to date on what we are doing, you will be able to watch the stream. You can watch it here on this blog, as well as ustream.tv and also at the DC Startup Weekend blog.

We will also be blogging the event throughout the weekend, and you can follow along at the DC Startup Weekend blog as well. If you have not signed up, it is not to late. If not, stayed tuned to find out what we come up with, it should be exciting times.

We have all done it before, set up a meeting or a get together or something for a specific time and then we either 1) show up late or 2) completely blow it off and not show up at all. I have done it, both examples above, but it is definitely an exception and not the norm for me. I know others have done it, and lately it seems that for most people it is the norm and not the exception.

By doing this, it sends a couple of clear messages to the ones on the receiving end of your complete an utter misconception of time. For starters, it sends the message that you think your time is more valuable than theirs, and given the situation (perhaps a job interview or an important business meeting) this is not the kind of impression you want to make. The second message it sends is that you do not hold the person with which you are to meet with to the same regard as you hold yourself, for whatever reason, they get the impression that you think you are better than them. Regardless of your conscious or subconscious reason(s) for disregarding other people’s time, you should give it a second thought before you do and and let the shoe be on the other foot and see if you would like it if they did it to you. Chances are the answer is no, so I ask, why do you do it then?

Next time you find yourself in the situation where you are like, ah, it is not big deal if I am 15 minutes late, such and such won’t mind, it is not like they have anything better to do, do whatever you can to speed yourself up and get there on time, you never know what may come out of it.

Kathy Sierra has done a fantastic job of pushing people to understand that it is all about the users and that you should design and build your products to produce passionate users. I could not agree more with her, it is about creating passionate users.

I think it is worth a minute of time to think about what comes before creating those passionate users, and that is as a company, you need to create passionate employees. In order for a company to create passionate users and therefore fantastic products, first they must start from within and create passionate employees. After all, what is a company without it’s employees, they are a company’s greatest asset. When the success or failure hangs in the bowels of your employees satisfaction, you are best served by doing everything you can to foster and environment that creates enthused, passionate employees.

When a company starts treating their employees like commodities, numbers, dispensable objects, then they cannot possibly care about the output of those employees anymore. Unenthusiastic and dispassionate employees have no real reason to go above and beyond what they have to to get by and therefore they wind up creating mediocre products at best. As a company, this can only go on for so long until it starts impacting your bottom line, both financially and your perception on the street. The potential end users of your products see that you are churning out mediocre products and will quickly turn away to your competitors who are offering higher quality products. You will quickly establish yourself as the laughing stock of the industry, or people will take every opportunity to bash you and claim that your products are no good. Well, if you are not creating passionate employees, chances are those naysayers are right.

The first step to recovery in this situation is to admit that you have a problem. Once you have admitted that you have a problem, you need to set a plan in place to fix the problem. Apple had this problem years ago when they were producing mediocre products and everyone wondered what was going on there. They knew they had a problem, and they set themselves up to fix it. Look at them now, they are the envy of everyone. It seems that everything they produce is a home run success. Not everyone can be Apple nor does everyone even want to be, some companies would prefer to continue to drive themselves into the ground, ignore the problems from within, just stay the current course of action. For those companies, I wish them all the best, but only time will tell their fate.