Tom talks with Andrew Kerr, CEO and Managing Partner at FortyAU, a technology consultancy in Nashville that builds innovative software for some of the world's largest companies. Andrew talks about balancing quality and speed in the software development process, why many software projects fail, and how a bad rollout can kill the best software, on this episode of the Fortune's Path podcast.
Andrew tells Tom about his book The Humility Imperative. Andrew tells how he likes speaking about and teaching on leadership, and how the book came from requests from students to write down his message. Andrew describes how Jim Collin's Good to Great influenced his thinking on humility in business. Andrew tells how ambition directed on behalf of a cause is much more powerful than personal ambition. Andrew tells how, even now as a $20m+ business, small clients are just as important to FortyAU as they were when the business started, and serving small clients is one way FortyAU stays true to its values. Small clients have been critical to helping FortyAU weather different economic storms and grow in all conditions. Tom asks how Andrew empowers his engineers to have an ownership mindset. Self managing teams work best for FortyAU, where the pressure to perform comes from within the team. Andrew encourages his engineers to care about business outcomes and the people effected by the project more than just getting code written. Andrew talks about how software is a living product that's always changing. Tom tells how good enough and available is better than perfect and not available. Andrew says that collisions with customers make software better. Andrew tells how important it is to get feedback from users and embrace change management. Andrew tells how morale and productivity often go down in an organization when new software is introduced. Andrew tells how his company built a tool that transformed a paper based process into an automated process, but got a lot of pushback from the customer that the software was buggy when it was not. After introspection, the customer realized they had botched their rollout and the quality of the software was high. Tom talks about how it's impossible to avoid user testing—you either do it before launch or it will happened after launch. Andrew says humility works the same way you are either humble, or you’ll be humbled by circumstances. Finally, Tom asks Andrew how he wants his kids to think about business.