Will be interesting to see how the market for weather derivatives develops. The range of applications for these products is endless. Thanks, John, for this site on these financial products.

At the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, 328,000 contracts were traded between January and April, up from just 4,200 a year earlier: article here.

One of the things that I am looking for in my next company is a strong and well-founded philosophy in the treatment of clients and employees.

I have always said that you need to look after your current clients first (ahead of future clients). There is no point in burning any bridges with a client just to make a fast buck somewhere else. The long term profitability will suffer.

The way in which the company treats its employees is equally as important. In a professional services firm, your people is all you have. They are the assets of the firm. Therefore, there needs to be the appropriate level of care and investment in the people that includes personal and professional development activities (tech/business training, soft skills training, collaborative environment, etc.) It also must include a package that is fair in monetary terms and provides some sense of comfort and satisfaction. Additionally, you need to invest in the softer side (social and cultural) of the business.

At the end of the day, client and employees must come before short term profits. If you don't have the former you don't have a business. The approach should always be to look at the mid-long term and invest in your relationships with your clients and employees. You will make more money in the long term…..

Many of us have tried to create a better workplace for everyone and to optimize the organization for success.

Having the appropriate functional sets of role and responsibilities and providing people with autonomy and accountability, are very important to people and their general happiness in their jobs. However, if you don't trust your people and feel you need to either micro-manage or devalue their contribution, you should not be runnng a company.

Management needs to provide strategic direction and benchmarks for measuring success. After that, it should be up to your trusted employees to execute the plan making them both accountable and responsible. Additionally, don't just set the demands and check in with them 3 minutes before delivery date: there should be more transparency and visibility into progress based on an acceptable level of bi-directional conversation.

One thing that Scrum does is define the roles of the Product Owner, Scrum Master and Scrum Team whereby the Product owner gets to say *what* should be done, and the team gets to decide *how* it should be done. Th Scrum Master ensures that the team follows the process and helps to take down barrier, impediments and to solve issues as they arise. It would be nice to see companies adopt this approach from a business management perspective.

Creating and fostering a culture that is truly energetic, interesting, collaborative and social is no easy task. Doing that within a consulting firm where 80% of the employees are on client site is even tougher. As Matt referenced in his blog, a culture cannot be manufactured… 

One of things I have been told by many of the employees at my previous employer (remember these are really solid engineers) is that they want to:

• Have an interesting variety of technical work, where they can learn new techniques and technologies
• Learn more about the Financial Services domain
• Work with like-minded people with whom they can collaborate on projects, learn about what others are doing & learning
• Have continuous exposure to the ongoing success of the company and to understand where they fit in
• Have access to personal and professional development activities
• Have fun !!

I am not saying you can just set this up, flip a switch and off we go. But it is very clear that there needs to be the willingness from the top-down to support and drive many of these facets from a financial, principal and energy perspective.

The company owners/management need to provide a framework to facilitate these things, drive and embrace employee ideas and provide a lot of energy and focus in showing their committment to following these ideas through. Techies know techies the best, so why not ask them what they want to do and incent them to build and keep the momentum.

Some obvious ideas include:

• Company wiki to provide cross-functional transparency within the firm. This includes who is doing what on projects, who are the clients, what are the technical challenges, what's the status of marketing, sales, corporate initiaitves, social events, training programs, etc. Everyone must have access to most of it.
• Regular (meaning EVERY WEEK) open (brown-bag, etc) meetings or forums for people to talk about what they are doing. Mix it up a bit: sales one week, an client project another, etc.
• Social events, both formally organized by company as well as informally with groups of employees. Use the email / wiki to collaborate.

and above all, get rid of the politics, micro-management and closed doors !

Whatever the approach or execution, the management of the company needs to embrace and foster this as one of THE most important things it does with its money. A consulting firm is its people. No happy people, no long term prospects for company.

I have decided to leave my current employer, Finetix, for pastures new. The main driver behind this is the birth of my baby girl a month ago which really put things into perspective for me: Why do we work and who do we work for ?

My doorman said something to me the other week that took me aback and really got me thinking: “You know Mr Hamilton, you can always make money, but you can never get the time back with your baby”. Wow.

To be honest, I need a change in role, responsibilities, career, etc, so with the nice weather and this change in perspective, now seemed like the natural and perfect time to make a break: it takes a lot to top hanging out with new family, sunshine, lots of golf, etc.

The last three years at Finetix has certainly been interesting and satisfying on a number of levels. I believe I have made many contributions and changes to the way the company is run, the way we look after our employees, the way we structure and execute projects (including the risk management side of things), the adoption of more formal agile approaches to projects, better control and visibility into the quality and finances of projects, etc. Of course, it has also been a rollercoaster ride filled with disagreements, disappointments and in some cases fundamental philosophical differences. I wish Finetix and its employees all the best, as they really do have some of the very best employees: I have never come across such a technically talented and dedicated bunch of people. I hope that I will get to work with many of them again.

So, what’s next (after family-time) ?

There are a few things that have always interested me. I am at heart an engineer (albeit in Aerospace, rather than Computer Science!) and love to build things. Design and delivery are very important to me, as is continuing to understand technology and its application to solutions. I really enjoy working with intelligent, thoughtful, articulate and considerate people. I have always enjoyed the marketing of technical solutions and/or products (hence my previous job working for myself helping emerging technology companies bring their products/services to market). Of course, Financial Services is a fascinating domain, and for me in particular risk management has been a big part of my career in FS. Finally, I think that the strategy of a company and its execution is highly rewarding and something I will always want to be a contributor to. So, any opportunity to combine these areas could have the potential of being the perfect job.

Updates, thoughts and progress will be posted as soon as I have had time to apply any brain-power to them, but only after I get back to playing to (or improving) my golf handicap..