Posts filed under 'Books'
June 3rd, 2008
I had the pleasure of reading “Three Men in a Boat” and “Three Men on a Bummel” by Jerome K. Jerome last week, two great books that I heartily recommend. Although they are more than 100 years old (Boat was first published in 1889 and Bummel in 1900; many of his works are available from Project Gutenberg) they are proof we haven’t changed much in a hundred years.
This passage in Chapter 15 of “Three Men in a Boat” on Work captures the spirit of perfectionism and that can hinder startup founders, especially those that are bootstrapping out of a spare bedroom or study in their house.
It seemed to me that I was doing more than my fair share of work on this trip, and I was beginning to feel strongly on the subject.
It always does seem to me that I am doing more work than I should do. It’s not that I object to work, mind you; I like work; it fascinates me, I can sit and look at it for hours. I love to keep it by me, the idea of getting rid of it nearly breaks my heart.
You cannot give me too much work; to accumulate work has almost become a passion with me; my study is so full of it now that there is hardly an inch of room for any more. I shall have to throw out a wing soon.
And I am careful of my work, too. Why, some of the work that I have by me now has been in my possession for years and years, and there isn’t a finger-mark on it. I take great pride i my work; I take it down now and then and dust it. No man keeps his work in a better state of preservation than I do.
But, though I crave for work, I still like to be fair. I do not ask for more than my proper share.
January 22nd, 2008
Steve Blank gave a great tutorial last August at TIE on his “Customer Development” and “Customer Validation” methodology. These are the first two steps of “Four Steps to the Epiphany,” his textbook on how high technology startups should approach the marketing and business development challenges they face. His slides are here (note that this is a PDF file) http://www.tiesv.org/TGS/EM/manageEvent/presentationDocument/471_790
Blank outlined the default high tech startup process and key phases for engineering team
- Seed Stage: develop concept
- Product Development
- Alpha & Beta Test
- Launch - First Customer Shipment
and then looked at how other customer facing functions contribute (note Seed Stage omitted because customer oriented typically not involved).
| Engineering |
Product Development |
Alpha / Beta Test |
Launch /
First Customer Ship |
| Marketing |
- Marcom Materials
- Positioning
|
- Hire PR Agency
- Early Buzz
|
- Create Demand
- Launch Event
- Branding
|
| Sales |
|
- Hire VP Sales
- Hire Sales Staff
|
|
Business
Development |
|
|
|
Answering his own question “What’s Wrong With This?”
- Embeds premise of “Build it and They Will Come” that only works for life and death products like a cancer cure.
- Ignores real risks for most new technologies
- NOT Can we make it work?
- Will Customers Accept it?
- Will Markets Adopt
- Has Everyone Chasing the First Customer Ship as the Goal
- Sales & Marketing costs are front loaded
- De-emphasizes Learning & Discovery to Focused on Execution
- Execution & Hiring Predicated on Business Plan Hypotheses
- Heavy spending hit if product launch is wrong
- You don’t know if you’re wrong until you’re out of money.
His prescription for the fact that most startups die from a lack of customers not a product development failure is to propose a customer development process that runs in parallel to the product development process. In fact, this is what most bootstrappers do, they focus on customers and markets from day one because they don’t have enough resources not to.
In addition to the slides Steve has one of the best books for product development management in a startup called “Four Steps to the Epiphany” that outlines in excellent detail his customer development methodology.
Postscript: I went to buy a couple copies of Steve’s book and found that they were $10 cheaper on CafePress, so if you are thinking of buying a copy, compare the Amazon link above with Four Steps to the Epiphany on CafePress.
December 13th, 2007
Two articles from June of 2003, the month I decided to start SKMurphy, Inc. First up is “Life in the Bust Belt” by Po Bronson in Wired with the following observations that reflected much of the conventional wisdom in Silicon Valley at the time:
As a regional economy, Silicon Valley will steam ahead splendidly; as an icon, however, it’s over.
Perhaps most telling is a newfound and poignant reluctance when it comes to startups. Says one San Francisco entrepreneur who founded three companies, “I never want to start another company again. I saw an ugliness in human character that destroyed my faith in the common man.”
I doubt startups will ever become commonplace again. Most new products will be funded and developed through intrapreneur programs at well-established companies. Venture-funded startups will be reserved for only the rare great ideas. They’ll be highly watched anomalies, a spectator sport for the average Highway 101 commuter.
Silicon Valley 3.0 needs people who are good at working a single problem for several years. The kind of people who don’t find themselves saying, after only six months, “Enterprise server software has gotten old.” People who don’t mind that it takes two years to be promoted from Web engineer to bottom-rung manager
As my uncle John used to say “It’s generally accepted, so generally accepted it may not be true at all.” So far at least Mr. Bronson has proven to be too darkly pessimistic. Two month earlier, in April of 2003, Roger McNamee wrote “The New Normal” for Wired (that later became the book, “The New Normal“)
In the New Normal, the trick is to get real about the new set of challenges we face and what it takes to win in an environment where there are no shortcuts. “You have two choices,” says McNamee. “You can say, ‘I’m out. I’m never going to do this again.’ Or, if you’re a lifer, you say, ‘Okay, what lessons have I learned? Because I have to do it again, whatever the circumstances in the marketplace. I’m just going to be a lot smarter this time.’ If you’re willing to do some homework, and if you’re willing to be a little different from everyone else, there are countless opportunities worth pursuing. That’s what the New Normal is all about.”
Which brings me to the second article “How To Make Your Own Luck” by Daniel Pink in Fast Company.
It’s really a summary of Richard Wiseman’s “The Luck Factor: Changing Your Luck, Changing Your Life: The Four Essential Principles.”
- Maximize Chance Opportunities: Lucky people are skilled at creating, noticing, and acting upon chance opportunities. They do this in various ways, which include building and maintaining a strong network, adopting a relaxed attitude to life, and being open to new experiences.
- Listen to Your Lucky Hunches Lucky people make effective decisions by listening to their intuition and gut feelings. They also take steps to actively boost their intuitive abilities — for example, by meditating and clearing their mind of other thoughts.
- Expect Good Fortune Lucky people are certain that the future will be bright. Over time, that expectation becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy because it helps lucky people persist in the face of failure and positively shapes their interactions with other people.
- Turn Bad Luck Into Good Lucky people employ various psychological techniques to cope with, and even thrive upon, the ill fortune that comes their way. For example, they spontaneously imagine how things could have been worse, they don’t dwell on the ill fortune, and they take control of the situation.
December 12th, 2007
I get the New York Enterprise Report delivered (it’s a controlled circulation–free–subscribe here) and was reading it this afternoon when I came across some great advice from Andrea R. Nierenberg in their “Ask the Expert” column.
Q: Like most small business owners, I find there aren’t enough hours in the day to accomplish all I want to do. Plus there is another, growing demand on my time — people who call me and e-mail me asking for my advice, help, etc. I feel that as a growing business, I need to get back to anyone who communicates with me, and I am aware that these contacts may provide some opportunities for my company. But the sheer volume is beginning to bog me down. Do I owe a response to everyone who contacts me? If so, how do I handle it all?
A: I have been a business owner for over 13 years, and a week does not go by without someone calling or e-mailing me to “pick my brain” (a phrase that, by the way, I detest). While I always believe in the courtesy of responding to everyone, I am also a stickler for time management. Here is how I handle my inquiries:
When someone calls, I immediately say, “I have five minutes: how can I help you?” As the caller starts to tell his story, I stop him or her and say, “Would you mind writing down your specific questions and let me know what you have done so far to seek a solution? Then, please e-mail them to me, in bulleted form, so that we can arrange a follow-up meeting or phone call. This way, I’ll be prepared and we can get right to the matter.” Here is the funny thing: About 5% of the people actually follow up. I have found that while many people say they want your advice, time and suggestions, they will never act on what you say — so I find out in advance by asking them to meet me halfway. The ones that are serious about soliciting my advice or opinion will follow through.
With an E-mail inquiry, I will basically give the same sort of reply. Like many people, I carry a BlackBerry and I will glance at my e-mails all day long. But for the sake of time management, I often wait to answer them all at once, when I have a mini-block of time.
To keep things under control, it’s also crucial to batch these kinds of calls by category and importance. Don’t stop and start on each inquiry that comes in without finishing your prior work. You will only get more bogged down.
A caveat here: If during the first few minutes of the phone call, or if in reading the initial e-mail, I know I cannot help this individual or provide useful advice, I immediately say so; if possible, I may refer him or her to someone else. The last thing I want to do is waste time figuring out “some way” to help someone when I know that ultimately I won’t be able to.
Regardless of who calls, always take those few minutes to listen carefully and be courteous. Be firm, stick to your time limit, and remind them that you can talk to them at a later date, when you have blocked out the time. Let people know that your time is valuable and help them get to the point. I’ve made some great connections and contacts through lending a helping hand, and I firmly believe that what goes around does come around. You just have to set up your rules so that your helping hand remains just that and you can get on with the business of running your business.
I don’t know that you should be quite so brusque with prospects, but let’s turn this around for a minute an assume you were going to ask someone for help. I think there is some good advice here if you are planning to ask someone with expertise for help.
- If it’s in writing (for example in a forum):
- Outline very briefly who you are
- your situation or problem
- what you have done to investigate and/or solve the problem
- what specific alternatives you are trying to choose from or have ruled out
- Any other directly relevant information
- On the phone: E-mail ahead the information above adding
- who suggested that you contact the person
- how helping you might also help the other person
- end your call in five minutes or less unless the other person is clearly interested in talking
- Approaching a speaker after a talk
- Introduce yourself, exchange business cards, and ask if they mind you e-mailing a question about “X” in less than thirty seconds. Especially if there are folks behind you the speaker may be anxious to chat with them briefly as well.
- When you follow up mention where you met them and that they said is was OK to follow up (unless they didn’t say it was OK, in which case don’t).
I am amazed at the number of folks who ask questions on forums without doing any basic homework. It’s much more motivating to read they have tried six things and are now asking for help because none of them gave a satisfactory answer. I am disappointed at events by the number of folks who strike up long conversation with the speaker and there are half a dozen or a dozen people in line. You can always get back in line or wait until the line clears to see if the presenter wants to have a longer conversation.
Chapter 6 “Knowing Who Knows, Plugging Into the Knowledge Network” in How to be a Star at Work by Robert Kelley also details an excellent model for connecting with experts stressing the need to
- Build your network before you need it, if possible.
- Be very mindful of people’s time and don’t waste it.
- Give careful thought to how you phrase your request or question.
- Summarize your attempts to solve the problem or find the information you as asking for help with.
- Verbally thank and follow up in writing, publicly credit.
December 4th, 2007
I came across a good quote on innovation and invention in a 2004 article in Fortune Magazine by Harold Evans called “What Drives America’s Greatest Innovators“ (emphasis added)
[The] defining characteristic of the innovator: a determination to bring a brainwave into the bustle of the marketplace. […]
More innovations come from borrowing and combining than simple invention. “I invented nothing new,” Henry Ford said, “I simply assembled into a car discoveries of other men behind whom were centuries of work.” It sounds easy, but it emphasizes another quality more significant than originality: imagination as manifest in the ability to see relationships.
Harold Evans is the author of “They Made America” which was also made into a four hour PBS special.
August 8th, 2007
The sales process may seem like a simple exchange - you convince a prospect to accept your product or service in exchange for their money. However, there are a number of overlapping processes running to get you to that point.
A few thoughts about one of them: the process that prospects go through to decide if they are going to buy from you. Jerry Weissman has framed this as Understand, Believe, and Act.
First a prospect must understand what you have to offer. This is straightforward when your product is a better, faster, cheaper version. But this is much more difficult when it is an innovative technology. Demos and sales pitches become critical. We joke that “If you are looking for smarter prospects who will understand your offer, then maybe your demo sucks!” Sadly, this is often the case (we have even had to apply it to our pitches from time to time).
Presenting an innovative technology in a way that’s understandable to a prospect is never easy. The language, the problems, and why it is better must be grounded in the prospects world. If you give a prospect a feature list, some will be able to “get it”, but not many. To reach most prospects, you must start from a problem that they know they have, and offer a solution they can understand.
Secondly, prospects must believe that your innovative technology will actually deliver them the benefits you promise. New technology always brings risk. They may risk losing their job–or at least putting a “dent in their career”–if you don’t deliver! The first people who will trust you are folks with whom you already have a prior shared success. They know you can deliver. Usually these people are the source for your early sales. When your first clients say “I used it and it worked” to their friends they give you credibility. Eventually you must get to strangers referring other strangers to buy. Testimonials on your website are critical for prospects believing your claims. Testimonials, like your demo, must be in the language customers use and from people who are credible.
Only after they understand and believe will customers ever act. But they act on their own cycle, whether it’s a certain point in the product development process, a certain time of year, or a phase of the moon. It’s their timing! Your challenge is to make sure they remember your offering when they are looking for it. For this reason you need a method of reminding those people that you have a solution. We call this percolating. This is the function that applications like Salesforce provide: you can set up a sales campaign to remind you to contact everyone who is percolating every 6 weeks or so (or whenever they wanted to hear back from you next). Another method we have seen work well are newsletters. If you can help your prospect and send them something useful every 6 weeks, people will join the mailing list and remember you when they have a problem you can help them solve. Be there when they are ready to act.
August 1st, 2007
I wrote earlier in “Kierkegaard On the Art of Helping Others To Understand” about the need to understand where what Jerry Weissman calls “Point A” is for a prospect. Here is an excerpt from his book “Presenting to Win: The Art of Telling Your Story” (pages 6-7, emphasis in original) on persuasion.
Persuasion: Getting From Point A to Point B
All presentation situations have one element in common.
Whether it’s a formal presentation, speech, sales pitch, seminar, jury summation, or a pep talk, every communication has as its goal to take the audience from where they are at the start of your presentation, which is Point A, and move them to your objective, which is Point B. This dynamic shift is persuasion.
[…]
In psychological terms, Point A is the inert place where your audience starts: uninformed, knowing little about you and your business; dubious, skeptical about your business and ready to question your claims; or in the worst-case scenario, resistant, mentally committed to a position contrary to what you’re asking them to do.
What you are asking them to do is Point B. The precise nature of Point B depends upon the particular persuasive situation you face. To reach Point B, you need to move the uninformed audience to understand, the dubious audience to believe, and the resistant audience to act in a particular way. In fact, understand, believe, and act are not three separate goals, but three stages in reaching a single, cumulative, ultimate goal. After all, the audience will not act as you want them to act if they don’t first understand your story and believe the message it conveys.
June 14th, 2007
Between 1993 and 1998 Richard A. Moran authored four books of business advice–similar in tone and size to H. Jackson Brown’s 1991 “Life’s Little Instruction Book“–that were collections between three and four hundred bullet points of pithy advice:
- Never Confuse A Memo with Reality (1993)
- Beware Those Who Ask For Feedback (1994)
- Cancel the Meeting, Keep the Doughnuts (1995)
- Fear No Yellow Stickies (1998)
Moran, who recently joined Venrock as a partner, has put all four books in a blender and created a synthesis with “Nuts, Bolts,and Jolts: Fundamental Business Lessons You Must Know,” retaining most of the bullets from all four books but organizing them into chapters with a couple of pages of expository perspective to frame and counterpoint their epigrammatic style.
What follows is my selection of his seven best observations for entrepreneurs.
“Easy projects, easy sales, or hot new business opportunities
are like children’s soccer; everyone clusters around the ball.”
As a startup you are better served to be far from the crowd at least initially so that you can learn in (and own a niche) of your own.
“Learn the difference between running a meeting and leading a group.”
Lead (and sell) with your ears. Focus on objectives and results, not methods and facilitation. Even when it’s your initiative, if you are the leader you are better served to have someone else present it (after appropriate shared rehearsal) so that you can better gauge reactions and be more alert to feedback.
“Ask for input only if you plan to do something with it or about it.”
This is especially true in customer service and product marketing roles (and any management role). Don’t raise expectations that you will take action on the information you ask for if you have no plans (or ability or resources) to follow through.
“Being good is important. Being trusted is essential.”
Trust is essential to any early relationship that a startup forms. It can be especially tempting with prospects (and even customers) to violate their expectations and unilaterally amend an agreement (e.g. when features are going to be ready or a particular bug will be fixed) to give them something “better.” The challenge, as Gerald Weinberg observed in “Secrets of Consulting” is that “People don’t tell you when they stop trusting you.”
“When told you don’t understand the big picture, ask to see that big picture.”
I think the opposite is even more true: don’t tell someone that they don’t understand the Big Picture, offer them a rich enough context for your advice or direction so that they gain a better appreciation for your perspective. Bob Lewis offers a similar prescription in his 3/11/2002 Tip (registration required) on “Context: make sure you provide lots of information about it. Whether an employee is writing a program, designing a network, or deciding whether a course of action is worthwhile, it’s the context that determines the answer. So don’t let employees just ‘do their job.’ Their job, after all, ought to be doing what makes the most sense, which means that they need to understand how it fits into the bigger picture.”
“Technology eventually evens out. Compete on service and talented people.”
A technology advantage can allow you to seize a niche, but for staying power you need excellent service and a commitment to hiring folks with the appropriate talents and helping them to continue to develop them.
“Great ideas and solutions to problems often occur right before you fall asleep at night. Get up and write them down or they will be lost in the morning.”
This is excellent advice. I carry 3×5 cards during the day and keep a pen and pad of paper on my nightstand. More than once it’s happened that I have been wrestling with challenging project or problem and either awakened in the middle of the night or a few minutes before the morning alarm went off with a solution clear in my mind. It’s amazing how fast an insight or solution can dissipate if you don’t get at least a fragment of it written down.
Moran has some great advice for startup CEO’s on how to prepare for and run effective board meetings in an April 16, 2007 article “Elephants in the Boardroom“ on SandHill.com.
May 25th, 2007
There are some good insights in Seth Godin’s The Dip, his slim new volume devoted to excellence, perseverance, and organized abandonment. Godin doesn’t say “organized abandonment” which is a concept developed by Peter Drucker, but “quitting.” Godin offer’s three checks to perform before you quit and backs into the need for a plan with his third:
Three Questions to Ask Before Quitting (pages 66-71)
- Am I Panicking? Decide in advance when you are going to quit.
- Who Am I Trying to Influence? A person or a market? Markets value persistence far more than an individual.
- What Sort of Measurable Progress am I Making?
The key point is to decide what failure looks like before you start (and unexpected success, which for an entrepreneur signals that a product deserves more investment, potentially even third party investment in addition to re-directed internal resources) so that you know when to quit.
Even at $7.77 on Amazon it’s a good blog post stretched out for 75 pages. Spend $13.57 on The Daily Drucker and get 365 one page nuggets of wisdom from Peter Drucker. The entry for March 14 on Universal Entrepreneurial Disciplines might well substitute for most of Godin’s book.
Every institution–and not only business– must build into its day-to-day management four entrepreneurial activities that run in parallel. One is organized abandonment of products, services, processes, markets, distribution channels, and so on that are no longer an optimal allocation of resources. Then, any institution must organize for systematic, continuing improvement. Then it has to organize for systematic and continuous exploitation, especially of its successes. And finally, it has to organize systematic innovation, that is, create the different tomorrow that makes obsolete and, to a large extent, replaces even the most successful products of today in an organization. I emphasize that these disciplines are not just desirable; they are conditions for survival today.
ACTION POINT: Abandon what is about to be obsolete, develop a system to exploit your successes. And develop a systematic approach to innovation.
Drucker wrote about this at greater length in his book Management Challenges for the 21st Century, the chapter on “Change Agents” was run as an article in Inc Magazine and is available free on-line. This excerpt elaborates on his core concept of organized abandonment. This model is especially important for entrepreneurs.
For being a change leader requires the willingness and ability to change what is already being done just as much as the ability to do new and different things. It requires policies and practices that make the present create the future.
Abandon yesterday. The first step for a change leader is to free up resources that are committed to maintaining things that no longer contribute to performance and no longer produce results. Maintaining yesterday is always difficult and extremely time-consuming. Maintaining yesterday always commits the institution’s scarcest and most valuable resources–and above all, its ablest people–to nonresults. Yet doing anything differently–let alone innovating–always creates unexpected difficulties. It demands leadership by people of high and proven ability. And if those people are committed to maintaining yesterday, they are simply not available to create tomorrow.
The first change policy, therefore, has to be organized abandonment. The change leader puts every product, every service, every process, every market, every distribution channel, every customer, and every end use on trial for its life. And the change leader does so on a regular schedule. The question it has to ask–and ask seriously–is “If we did not do this already, would we, knowing what we now know, go into it?” If the answer is no, the reaction must not be “Let’s make another study.” The reaction must be “What do we do now?”
In three cases the right action is always outright abandonment:
1. When you think that the product, service, market, or process “still has a few good years of life.” It is the dying products, services, markets, or processes that always demand the greatest care and effort. And we almost always overestimate how much “life” actually is left. Usually, they are not dying; they are dead.
2. When the only argument for keeping a product, service, market, or process is that “it’s fully written off.” To treat assets as being fully written off has its place in tax accounting, but for management the question should never be “What has it cost?” The question should be “What will it produce?”
3. When for the sake of maintaining the old and declining product, service, or process, the new and growing product, service, or process is being stunted or neglected.
For every product, service, market, or process, the change leader must also ask, “If we were to go into this now, knowing what we now know, would we go into it in the same way we are doing it now?” And that question needs to be asked about the successful products, services, markets, and processes as regularly–and as seriously–as about the unsuccessful products, services, markets, and processes. It applies with particular force to distributors and distribution channels, which, in a time of rapid change, tend to change faster than anything else.
From a career planning perspective (and a management perspective), the two book set by Marcus Buckingham “First, Break All The Rules” and “Now, Discover Your Strengths” focus on discovering and building on your unique strengths to achieve personal excellence.
May 1st, 2007
Ev Rogers’ seminal book, “Diffusion of Innovation” describes how people adopt innovations, e.g. new technology. He assumed a normal distribution of risk aversion. Geoffrey Moore’s insight was the chasm: the early majority is not influenced by early adopters, they want the comforts of an established market.
Human nature is risk adverse: most of us don’t like change. We would rather struggle with the beast we know that risk our jobs on a new technology that may not deliver it’s promises. But if the current situation is painful enough, we will adopt something new and risk changing the way we have always done it.
So how do you cross the chasm between the risk tolerant early adopters and risk averse early majority when introducing new technologies?
Look niche markets of early majority prospects who are in a lot of pain. If people are in enough pain they will change their behavior and risk adopting something new.
After entering niche markets, we can move technology up and out by using the ones in the most pain as reference case studies to the others. Also notice you start with the smallest niche market. This will allow you to make your early mistakes on a smaller market. It also buys you time and expertise to develop a whole product. Early majority prospects will not invest very much time or effort (very little compared to early adopters) to get your solution to work in their environment.
One you are across the chasm into your first niche, you want to continue to evaluate adjacent niches (those that would have some members who would be influenced by your current customers) that still have a lot of pain. Moore refers to this as the Bowling Alley, we show a representation slightly different from his where we sort going from smallest to largest in the most pain to less pain.
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