Agility, stability and taking on challenges

In the IT world, there is no doubt that agility is very important. Everything changes quickly, and without agility, companies would have a hard time surviving over the long run. However, this does not mean that people in the company want "agile" treatment. For example, if you were told to do things differently every day, you wouldn't feel secure and your performance would likely go down.

I have learned that stability is very important when it comes to the emotions of the people at a company. You wouldn't be able to work hard in an environment where you could be easily fired right after doing something wrong. You wouldn't trust the company if your salary was dramatically raised or cut according to your success or failure.

Agility is obtained by taking action without being 100% confident in what you are doing. Agility requires you to take risks to a certain degree. If a company corresponds a negative result of an action with financial punishment, the employee would stop taking risks. Stability in a way allows people to take risks. That is why I have put emphasis on stability when it comes to company administration.

We consider mistakes to be an indication of a system fault resulting in human error; not because an individual did something wrong. We have been increasing salaries quite steadily, making sure they keep increasing so that everyone could expect better financial results the following year. I consider these to be very important components of agility at work.

The downside of being stable over a long period of time is that once people find there isn't much change in their treatment, regardless of having taken risks or not, they'd choose not to take risks but stay in their current situation; start beating a dead horse. Stability can result in complacency. To improve the situation and make people work towards the next risk, I consider challenges necessary.

That is why we need to seriously take on challenges in the market. We are making commitments that require us to work on new developments. Interestingly, those are challenges mostly triggered by potential customers. We don't need to compete with our competitors; being challenged by customers is stimulating enough. That's how we were able to be on our own track, creating new products to approach the global market.