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August is Neal Stephenson (the “warrior monk of speculative fiction“) month at SKMurphy with quotes from a number of his books making their way into blog posts. For more on “warrior monks” see TV Tropes “Warrior Monk” entry. Here are some other blog posts that contain quotes from Neal Stephenson:
Maxim 157: Do not make Mistakes about Character. That is the worst and yet easiest error. Better be cheated in the price than in the quality of goods. In dealing with men, more than with other things, it is necessary to look within. To know men is different from knowing things. It is profound philosophy to sound the depths of feeling and distinguish traits of character. Men must be studied as deeply as books. Balthasar Gracian from “The Art of Worldly Wisdom” translated by Joseph Jacobs [1892]
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“Projects are the cumulative result of hundreds of minor and major Eureka moments.”
Tom Fishburne in “The Wiki Wall“
This is an abridged version of
“Projects are not the result of one Eureka moment at one point in time. They are the cumulative result of hundreds of minor and major Eureka moments throughout a project.”
How many eyeballs are passing by is a useless measure.
All that matters is, “how many people want to hear from you tomorrow?” Seth Godin in “Converting Viral Traffic“
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“People who succeed are often those who do the little, everyday things that others won’t.”
Henry Todd
“Software development, like professional sports, has a way of making thirty-year-old men feel decrepit.”
Neal Stephenson in “Snow Crash”
more context
“He recognizes many of the people in here, but as usual, he’s surprised and disturbed by the number he doesn’t recognize–all those sharp, perceptive twenty-one-year-old faces. Software development, like professional sports, has a way of making thirty-year-old men feel decrepit.”
Neal Stephenson in “Snow Crash”
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“Traditions are solutions to problems that we forgot we had.”
Good luck is what is left over after intelligence and effort have combined at their best. Luck is the residue of design.
Branch Rickey in Sporting News, Feb. 21, 1946. (per Yale Book of Quotations)
Often shortened to “Luck is the residue of design.” A longer version of this same quote is contained in several books from the 1990′s (including “Basic Concepts for Managing Telecommunications Networks: Copper to Sand to Glass to Air” by Lawrence Bernstein, C.M. Yuhas and “Branch Rickey as a Public Manager: Fulfilling the Eight Responsibilities of Public Management” by Robert D. Behn, in the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, J-PART 7 (1997)) it reads:
“Things worthwhile generally don’t just happen. Luck is a fact, but should not be a factor. Good luck is what is left over after intelligence and effort have combined at their best. Negligence or indifference are usually reviewed from an unlucky seat. The law of cause and effect and causality both work the same with inexorable exactitudes. Luck is the residue of design.”
“Maxim 158: Make use of your Friends. This requires all the art of discretion. Some are good afar off, some when near. Many are no good at conversation but excellent as correspondents, for distance removes some failings which are unbearable in close proximity to them. Friends are for use even more than for pleasure, for they have the three qualities of the Good, or, as some say, of Being in general: unity, goodness, and truth. For a friend is all in all. Few are worthy to be good friends, and even these become fewer because men do not know how to pick them out. To keep is more important than to make friends. Select those that will wear well; if they are new at first, it is some consolation they will become old. Absolutely the best are those well salted, though they may require soaking in the testing. There is no desert like living without friends. Friendship multiplies the good of life and divides the evil. ’Tis the sole remedy against misfortune, the very ventilation of the soul.” Balthasar Gracian from “The Art of Worldly Wisdom” translated by Joseph Jacobs [1892]
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“And being an excellent commander, about to go into a real battle, he had the wit to bring along a few people who could actually get things done for him. It may seem hard for you to believe, but mark my word–whenever serious and competent people need to get things done in the real world, all considerations of tradition and protocol fly out the window.”
Neal Stephenson in “Quicksilver”
Maxim 150: Think Beforehand. To-day for to-morrow, and even for many days hence. The greatest foresight consists in determining beforehand the time of trouble. For the provident there are no mischances and for the careful no narrow escapes. We must not put off thought till we are up to the chin in mire. Mature reflection can get over the most formidable difficulty. The pillow is a silent Sibyl, and it is better to sleep on things beforehand than lie awake about them afterwards. Many act first and then think afterwards–that is, they think less of consequences than of excuses: others think neither before nor after. The whole of life should be one course of thought how not to miss the right path. Rumination and foresight enable one to determine the line of life. Balthasar Gracian from “The Art of Worldly Wisdom” translated by Joseph Jacobs [1892]
One must regard any theory as tentative, subject to error, and likely to be disconfirmed; one must be suspicious of it. However, one’s theory-in-use is his only basis for action. To be effective, a person must be able to act according to his theory-in-use clearly and decisively, especially under stress. One must treat theory-in-use as both a psychological certainty and an intellectual hypothesis.”
“Without ducking responsibility, what’s wrong with medicine today is that it is predicated on providing treatment, not on reducing suffering. Not on solving problems.”
The Last Psychiatrist in “Ramachandran’s Mirror“
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“That we occasionally violate our own stated moral code does not imply that we are insincere in espousing that code.”
Major Napier in Neal Stephenson’s “The Diamond Age”
“…the ancient character of the neighborhood began to assert itself, as the bones of the knuckles reveal their shape beneath the stretched skin of a fist.”
Neal Stephenson in “The Diamond Age”
I had an epiphany recently about the congruence between Peter Cohan‘s Great Demo! methodology and a lean approach to sales and presentation practices. I use the following simple definition for lean practices from Wikipedia:
[Lean] considers the expenditure of resources for any goal other than the creation of value for the end customer to be wasteful, and thus a target for elimination. Working from the perspective of the customer who consumes a product or service, “value” is defined as any action or process that a customer would be willing to pay for.
The simplest definition of the Great Demo! is “Do the Last thing First”
Which means that you should focus a demo on the critical element of your offering that your customer is interested in. This normally means that you have a plan for covering the following in about six to eight minutes.
Introduce – Summarize Situation
Offer an illustration or example of the result or outcome the customer wants
Do The Last Thing First – show how to achieve this result as directly and in as few steps as possible.
Answer questions, this may include peeling back the layers on other features or needs.
Summarize the key take-aways and next steps.
Your hope is that step 3 turns step 4 into a much longer conversation but you are prepared to pack up and leave if they are not interested in the key results you can offer them.
But why is this lean? There are normally two good reasons why a startup wants to demo their offering to a customer:
To offer a vision of a solution to trigger a conversation about a problem that the customer is interested in solving and to gain a deeper understanding of their needs and objectives.
To offer technical proof that your offering can solve their problem and trigger a conversation about how they can implement and roll out the solution in their business.
In both cases you are focused on understanding what the customer needs and is willing pay for: your vehicle for this is the conversation that occurs after you have illustrated your solution with a key example that communicates your understanding of their needs. The summarize step is a critical part of that communication. By summarizing what you have heard you allow them to correct any mistaken impressions you may have gathered, and by summarizing your message again briefly at the end, you have an opportunity to focus more specifically on their needs with what you have learned.
All too often however, startups offer one of these demos instead:
An IQ test: that asks the prospect “can you figure out how you might use this product to create value in your business.?” Here the focus is not on a vision of a solution that will create value for your customer but an explanation of your technology.
A smorgasbord of features: that asks for a lot of time to explore your product and offers a “proof by exhaustion” that there must be something in the product that they will find useful. These can degenerate into training sessions that make the assumption the customer has seen the value already instead of offering technical proof of a result you know that they will value.
Their funding presentation: the investors liked it so the customers should as well, never mind that they are two distinct audiences with very distinct needs and objectives for doing business with your firm.
There is quite a bit more to the Great Demo! methodology than I have outlined here, but at root it encourages you to save your customer’s time by getting to the point quickly with an example of a solution you believe that the customer will find valuable. The real goal of a demo is a serious conversation: either about a customer’s needs or how they can they implement your offering in their business.
Note on “Customer” vs. Prospect: I use customer throughout this post when most of the time they are actually prospective customers or prospects, I normally reserve customer to mean someone who has paid you but felt customer provided a better linkage with the lean definition.
Update Sep 3: I was reminded that I also blogged about the “Situation Slide” formulation used by Great Demo! to guide pre-demo discovery of customer needs. See “Worry About Scaling After You Find Your Niche”
Great Demo!: How To Create And Execute Stunning Software Demonstrations
by Peter Cohan
Great Demo! provides sales and pre-sales staff with a method to dramatically increase their success in closing business through substantially improved software demonstrations. It draws upon the experiences of thousands of demonstrations, both delivered and received from vendors and customers. The distinctive “Do the Last Thing First” concept generates a “Wow!” response from customers.
“Things worthwhile generally don’t just happen. Luck is a fact, but should not be a factor. Good luck is what is left over after intelligence and effort have combined at their best. Negligence or indifference are usually reviewed from an unlucky seat. The law of cause and effect and causality both work the same with inexorable exactitudes. Luck is the residue of design.”
I think I like this sentence the best: “Good luck is what is left over after intelligence and effort have combined at their best.”
I heard a manager say: “Well, if he didn’t have that particular pitch, he would not even be in professional ball, and here he is, going in the majors or he’s in AAA.” Well it’s just as sensible to say that if Padrewski couldn’t play the piano, he’d starve to death. The thing Padrewski’s doing is the thing he’s practiced since he was eight years of age, for approximately 8 hours a day in the first twenty years of his life, solemnly sitting at a piano preparing to do this particular thing. The mark of distinction that the man reaches is earned; if he couldn’t do this thing he would be no good. The fact is–he’s paid a tremendous price to be able to do this particular thing.
You can’t be good at everything. Pick methods and skills that your team is willing to practice enough to master that can be a basis for differentiation.
First of all, a man, whether seeking achievement on the athletic field or in business, must want to win. He must feel that the thing he is doing is worthwhile; so worthwhile that he is willing to pay the price of success to attain distinction.
Teams are motivated by a sense of mission, of working on the worthwhile. When they have a why you will find the how.
Don’t take away the confidence of a man in what he now has until he agrees with you that he he has won’t do. You better be on the safe side and urge him to keep what he has until what you are working on as a substitute proves better. Don’t force him to abandon bad form until you have substituted good form.
Good advice for managers, especially for managing knowledge workers.
Never surrender opportunity for security.
This may be a good definition for the entrepreneurial mindset: entrepreneurs are unwilling to give up completely on the opportunity to make things better to cling to what they have now.
How can one test theories that prescribe action? How can norms or values be tested?
Given that theories-in-use tend to make themselves true in the world, how can they be tested?
In a situation of action (particularly in a stressful situation), we are required to display a stance of action–that is, confidence, commitment, decisiveness. But in order to test a theory, one must be tentative, experimental, skeptical. How can we, in the same situation manifest the stance of action and the experimental stance.
One must regard any theory as tentative, subject to error, and likely to be disconfirmed; one must be suspicious of it. However, one’s theory-in-use is his only basis for action. To be effective, a person must be able to act according to his theory-in-use clearly and decisively, especially under stress. One must treat ‘theory-in-use’ as both a psychological certainty and an intellectual hypothesis.”
There is a lot in here and it’s a synthesis that I suspect Bloom will continue to explore and refine for a while. It’s hard to boil it down to a few conclusions but here are a few things that I took away.
Failing well produces more information than failing poorly. It’s not enough to fail fast.
Failure must be an option: you must be willing to abandon your approach in the face of new information.
Diversity of opinion, both maintaining an open mind about concurrent plausible hypothesis and a willingness to explain your situation, and in particular your failures to others is essential to getting unstuck.
A willingness to look at the facts of a situation (problem or opportunity) as distinct from your opinions and hypotheses, is a requirement for evolving any solution.
It’s an hour long but well worth your time.
Update Aug-24-2012: there is a lot in here, it’s a wide ranging exploration of insights from thinkers like:
Chris Argyris on “double loop learning”
Don Reinertsen on principles of flow and hypothesis management
I found a recent essay by George Gilder “Unleash the Mind” very thought provoking. I have selected some key excerpts and added my thoughts as to how they are particularly applicable to startups.
America’s wealth is not an inventory of goods; it is an organic entity, a fragile pulsing fabric of ideas, expectations, loyalties, moral commitments, visions.
This is also a good list for what’s needed for a startup to succeed: ideas, expectations, loyalties, moral commitments, and visions.
Capitalism is the supreme expression of human creativity and freedom, an economy of mind overcoming the constraints of material power. [...] It is dynamic, a force that pushes human enterprise down spirals of declining costs and greater abundance. The cost of capturing technology is mastery of the underlying science. The means of production of entrepreneurs are not land, labor, or capital but minds and hearts.
Entrepreneurs succeed when they create a sense of mission that captures the hearts and minds of an early team with the requisite skills.
Under capitalism, wealth is less a stock of goods than a flow of ideas, the defining characteristic of which is surprise. Creativity is the foundation of wealth. [...] Entrepreneurship is the launching of surprises. [...] Creativity cannot be planned because it is defined by information measured as surprise.
Early stage teams have to identify and exploit emerging market situations characterized by a high degree of uncertainty, they have to be ready to be surprised and to improvise solutions to unexpected problems and seize unanticipated opportunities. I observed in “Early Markets Offer Fluid Opportunities“ that startups see fluid opportunities in dynamic environments, but no certainties before opportunities pass or the “situation changes.”
Entrepreneurial knowledge has little to do with certified expertise, advanced degrees, or the learning of establishment schools. [...] [Entrepreneurs succeed] “not by leaving it to the experts but by creating new expertise, not by knowing what the experts know but by learning what they think is beneath them.”
It’s this willingness not only to sweat the details but to be wrong or at least be thought of as wrong–perhaps for a very long time–that characterizes the powerful kind of entrepreneurial persistence
As Peter Drucker has written, within companies there are no profit centers, only cost centers. Whether a particular cost yields a profit is determined voluntarily by customers and investors. Capitalism feeds on information that is outside of the company itself and therefore under the control of others. Only an altruistic orientation can tap the outside incandescence of information and learning that determine the success of capitalism’s gifts.
You have to care about your customers enough to aspire to create value by serving them. This aspiration can sustain you as you venture into the uncertain and the ambiguous opportunities. You hope at least to survive surprises you find, if not to be nimble and creative enough to take advantage of them.
Some related blogs posts on exploring ambiguous situations and surviving if not exploiting the surprises they hide:
With the economy in Silicon Valley in the summer doldrums this is a great time to hone your selling skills. If your startup sells technology products or services to businesses you should consider taking part in discussions on how to gear up your sales efforts.
Scott Sambucci of SalesQualia will be a featured speaker at the next Bootstrapper Breakfast in Sunnyvale on Tuesday, August 21 at 7:30am. He will offer about five minutes of prepared remarks on sales tips for startups from his new book “Startup Selling” followed by a roundtable discussion with all attendees. We will have a drawing for two signed copies of the book. Bring your sales questions and situations you would like to discuss.
“And being an excellent commander, about to go into a real battle, he had the wit to bring along a few people who could actually get things done for him. It may seem hard for you to believe, but mark my word–whenever serious and competent people need to get things done in the real world, all considerations of tradition and protocol fly out the window.” Neal Stephenson in “Quicksilver”
What attracts me to working with startups is the sense of creative flow that comes from contributing to a small fast moving team that just wants to get things done. It’s not so much about “breaking the rules” as focusing on what’s important and embracing a mission to make a difference. If protocol is “the customs and regulations dealing with diplomatic formality, precedence, and etiquette” then startups need to selectively break with tradition to succeed.
In “Building Codes for Software” I defined traditions as “solutions to problems that we forgot we had.” I think the challenge to breaking with tradition is making sure you understand the original problems that the tradition developed to prevent. This requires you to mentally simulate the impact of dispensing with a precedent or tradition before actually doing so. A team effort at imagining possible consequences will often outperform any one individual’s ability to anticipate likely outcomes.
The best startups are driven by a sense of mission, driven by a common purpose to move toward a better future, and not by a desire to rebel or to reject what may be obsolete methods and approaches without determining what can replace them. I think effective founders have a lot of order in their lives, stable relationships, self-discipline, and the ability to not only be creative but make and meet commitments.
We first met Jim Daily and Alan Wall underneath that big Carlsberg sign, sitting out in a late-afternoon rainstorm under an umbrella, having a couple of beers – “the only ferangshere,” as Wall told me on the phone, using the local term for foreign devil. Daily is American, 2 meters tall, blond, blue-eyed, khaki-and-polo-shirted, gregarious, absolutely plain-spoken, and almost always seems to be having a great time. Wall is English, shorter, dark-haired, impeccably suited, cagey, reticent, and dry. Both are in their 50s. It is of some significance to this story that, at the end of the day, these two men unwind by sitting out in the rain and hoisting a beer, paying no attention whatsoever to the industrial-scale whorehouse next door. Both of them have seen many young Western men arrive here on business missions and completely lose control of their sphincters and become impediments to any kind of organized activity. Daily hired Wall because, like Daily, he is a stable family man who has his act together. They are the very definition of a complementary relationship, and they seem to be making excellent progress toward their goal, which is to run two really expensive wires across the Malay Peninsula.
Since these two, and many of the others we will meet on this journey, have much in common with one another, this is as good a place as any to write a general description. They tend to come from the US or the British Commonwealth countries but spend very little time living there. They are cheerful and outgoing, rudely humorous, and frequently have long-term marriages to adaptable wives. They tend to be absolutely straight shooters even when they are talking to a hacker tourist about whom they know nothing. Their openness would probably be career suicide in the atmosphere of Byzantine court-eunuch intrigue that is public life in the United States today. On the other hand, if I had an unlimited amount of money and woke up tomorrow morning with a burning desire to see a 2,000-hole golf course erected on the surface of Mars, I would probably call men like Daily and Wall, do a handshake deal with them, send them a blank check, and not worry about it.
Update May 1, 2013: I received a question about this post
Q: An interesting paradox is that men like Daily and Wall challenge Neal Stephenson’s quote: “Software development, like professional sports, has a way of making thirty-year-old men feel decrepit.”
The question is…are they an exception to the rule or is the common notion that there is no place for thirty-plus-old men (and women) in a startup just plain wrong? I think it’s the latter. It’s true that youger people get more things done, but the older, more experienced ones do more of the right things.
I see advantages to mixed teams. Many of the soft skills required for success continue to accumulate with experience: e.g. management, sales, business development,… I have a pair of posts that address this:
I think there is also a difference between something making you feel old and not being able to play the game. I think the larger challenge is not that startups require the energy that only the young can summon, but that experience can blind you to novel combinations between old and new technologies that meet customer needs in a way that creates distinctive value.
Valve is a private company owned mostly by few individuals. In that sense, it is an enlightened oligarchy: an oligarchy in that it is owned by a few and enlightened in that those few are not using their property rights to boss people around. The question arises: what happens to the alternative spontaneous order within Valve if some or all of the owners decide to sell up? Granted that Valve’s owners do not intend to do this, the question remains, at least at the theoretical level.
One possibility is that Valve will divide and multiply into a number of different Valve-like companies, as its talented employees leave for greener pastures and, possibly, with the intend of re-creating the horizontal management structure that they grew happily familiar with. Another possibility is that the owners may actually sell their stake to Valve employees, thus combining the features of a co-op with the Valve management system.
You seem to miss a key point about Valve, your products have essentially zero unit cost. The flip side of this is the products are only really useful with huge amounts of combined effort. I’ll pay for 20 minutes of on excellent chef’s time, that has far more value to me than 20 minutes of a valve engineers time. This differences is what separates Valve, Github, and 37 Signals from more traditional companies, however this minor point never seems to be brought up in discussions about them.
But I still find the Valve handbook a very thought provoking model for harnessing the creative energy of a team, in the same way that Hewlett and Packard developed a set of cultural practices that fostered innovation and were copied by many other firms in Silicon Valley.
Here are two excerpts that agree with Varoufakis’ conclusions that it is an enlightened oligarchy but disagree that it can scale to other industries (echoing Aaron’s insightful comment) or even to a substantially larger size.
The author claims (a) that hierarchical managements lead to “corporate serfdom” and to “Soviet-like” dominance within the framework of the corporation itself, thereby crushing creativity and wasting resources, (b) that all this is made by possible by “toxic finance,” and (c) that it is all “co-dependent with political structures that are losing democratic legitimacy fast.”
Corporate serfdom? Toxic finance? Co-dependent on illegitimate political structures? This lumps every early-stage startup with every mega-corporation that has ever existed and, in effect, calls them all illegitimate. And that is a political assumption about “corporations” in the abstract, not an empirical analysis, because it cannot possibly be defended as an empirical analysis.
[...]
What, then, does Valve offer that makes it different? It too is a corporation. It is privately owned by a few persons who have had the luxury of screening all employees so as to hire only very bright, highly self-motivated persons to do predominantly creative forms of work. Working with such employees, Valve has been able to build a successful model by which these bright, motivated employees get to choose 100% of their projects and have complete freedom on how they manage their own time and on what results they seek to achieve. It all sounds like an amazing work environment but how many businesses get to focus in this way on creative forms of work or get to screen carefully to make sure they only hire self-motivated employees? And how many businesses have the luxury of doing this without needing to raise outside capital through their early stages? Moreover (and the author himself raises this point), to what extent can this scale? Can such a model work if the company grows a thousandfold and suddenly has 40,000 employees? Of course, the model inevitably breaks down at some point along the way because the environment in which the Valve employees currently function is highly unusual if not unique.
I agree with George’s analysis but I think that Valve still offers an interesting model for startups and small teams doing software or creating intellectual property to learn from.
Update Aug-12: Doug Withau left a comment suggesting some other resources for enlightened management:
I will be speaking on “Accelerating Your Sales” on on Thursday, August 9th at 6:30pm at GroundFloorSV Bring sales questions and situations you would like to discuss.
Bring any (or all!) of the following with you:
A gnarly sales opportunity with an active prospect where you’d like some help;
A prospect that you’d like to pull into a sales process but haven’t figured out how to crack;
