Posts filed under 'Rules of Thumb'
August 3rd, 2008
In an article in Scientific American Mind called “Sleep on it, How Snoozing Makes You Smarter,” Robert Stickgold and Jeffrey Ellenbogen conclude that at least six hours of sleep per night is essential to cognitive function (hat tip to Hacker News)
[W]hile we sleep, our brain is anything but inactive. It is now clear that sleep can consolidate memories by enhancing and stabilizing them and by finding patterns within studied material even when we do not know that patterns might be there. It is also obvious that skimping on sleep stymies these crucial cognitive processes: some aspects of memory consolidation only happen with more than six hours of sleep. Miss a night, and the day’s memories might be compromised—an unsettling thought in our fast-paced, sleep-deprived society.
I read Sleep by Gay Gaer Luce and Julius Segal in high school have long been fascinated by concepts such as REM sleep and the circadian rhythm. Even before I started drinking coffee when I was 15, I have looked for ways to minimize the amount of sleep I needed (or thought I needed). I started meditating when I was 17 and continue irregularly to today. It’s only recently that I quit “pulling all nighters.” OK, I take that last one back, at least once every two or three months I will be bothered by the sun coming up while I am working at my desk.
One of the risks of a start-up is the loss of structure compared to the regular workday world: many teams take this as an opportunity to work more hours, or at least spend more time in front of the computer. The scientific evidence that cutting back on sleep is counter-productive is now overwhelming: if only this data allowed me to develop the self-discipline to work a regular schedule. It’s harder than it looks–after all wasn’t one of the reasons for becoming your own boss was that you could set your own hours?
There is something strangely difficult for me about surrendering to the need for sleep. I don’t know whether it’s a lack of recognition of limits and budgets, or an inability to work too far in advance of deadline (WARNING - dates on calendar may be closer than they appear!) and the need to prioritize and make trade-offs.
I like to think of myself as a little smarter than when I was in kindergarten, but the objective evidence may not support it.
I notice that when I get enough sleep I will sometimes spend the last dream of the morning solving (or at least advancing on a solution) to a problem I have been wrestling with. I keep a notepad and pen next to my bed that I use at least once or twice a week, sometimes in the middle of the night (or early morning) and often just as I awake. So perhaps I should re-frame and consider sleep to be a necessary part of the workday where memories get processed and summarized into more useful patterns. Easier said than done but probably a very necessary habit for long term success as an entrepreneur.
July 30th, 2008
This phrase is attributed to Sergey Gorshkov, the commander in chief of the Soviet Navy from 1956 to 1985, who managed it’s dramatic expansion during the Cold War. Perfectionists get this wrong, siding with “Better.” Entrepreneurs who prosper, for the most part, side with “Good Enough” and keep improving.
I was reminded of this quote when I read a recent blog post “Vaporware” by Chris Crawford, who is working on new start-up called Storytron in the interactive storytelling space. I have a lot of respect for Chris Crawford, who is an innovator in the computer gaming field. I subscribed to his “Journal of Computer Game Design” and took away a number of useful insights.
In particular his 1992 article “Lessons from Patton Strikes Backl” outlines several useful concepts that most early stage and niche software companies should keep firmly in mind, what follows is a lightly edited summary of his five lessons:
- Start with a clear mission statement. The essence of game design is decision-making; a designer makes thousands of decisions during the course of a project. Your choice is always between options with different merits. This is one advantage of the clear mission statement: it simplifies the decision-making process. Instead of asking, “Which option is better?” you need instead ask only, “Which option better fits my mission statement?” This latter question is more precise, more specific, and therefore easier to answer. More important, it is faster to answer. The bulk of a game designer’s important work is making decisions about what to include and what to pass up; anything that makes this difficult process faster and more reliable is worthwhile.
- Plan then code at a program level, code then plan at a feature level. Hacked code is so brittle that, over the long run, it takes more time to debug and maintain than properly structured code. [Planned, well structured code] can be easily modified and corrected after it has been written. The early stages of a game project have us writing code that we know will change considerably later on. However, there is another time scale to consider: the short-term time scale in which we write up a single feature. Most game programming is in some way experimental; any feature that is fully understood is probably obsolete in our fast-moving industry. You can’t plan such code in advance; you just have to wade in and hack until you figure it out. The conclusion I came to is this: hack first, then recode it right.
- Don’t be seduced by the cleverness of your own ideas. This was the single biggest mistake I made. I came up with a truly clever idea…and I was justifiably proud of it. But it caused too many problems. [It] turned out to be clumsy to use. Most players eschewed it. I should have had the courage to dump a clever idea that, in the final analysis, created more problems than it solved. I didn’t, and the game suffered for it.
- Bake the cake first, then add the icing. Publishers sell games in the same way that bakers sell cake. The customer doesn’t taste the cake until he gets it home; all he sees in the store is the icing. So bakers don’t sell cake; they sell icing. In the same way, most publishers don’t give a damn about gameplay (cake); all they care about are the graphics and sound (icing). With Patton Strikes Back, I baked the cake before I even showed it to any publisher. I designed and developed the game first. I finished all the basic game structures, wrote and tuned the artificial intelligence, even got much of the play balance worked out. Only then did I show it to publishers. Guess what they wanted? More icing! At that point, it was easy. Having finished the cake, it was easy to pile the icing on.
- Make sure there is a market for your product before you develop it. Patton Strikes Back was a “wargame for the rest of us.” It received excellent reviews. Unfortunately, it has not sold well. It would seem that “the rest of us” aren’t buying computer wargames. The aficionados certainly hated it. Without their support, the game withered…I will never make a significant income from the game. Lesson #5 is, I think, the most important lesson to learn from Patton Strikes Back.
Real candor and some valuable lessons. Two I take to heart are to stay clear on the mission and to guard against being seduced by my own “clever ideas.”
I am of two minds about Chris Crawford’s Storytron effort. It’s possible that they will make a huge breakthrough, certainly he has done several very innovative interactive games to date. His 1982 book “The Art of Computer Design” is out of print but still worth reading on-line for it’s insights into how to create engaging interactive environments, appropriate for anyone developing advanced analytics or social software. But it increasingly looks like an effort that’s suffering from “mission creep.” What follows are some selections from his “Vaporware” post, highlighting the team’s issues with traction and “making things better” (bold text in original):
Perhaps you have noticed that Storytron seems to be suffering from a bad case of the vapors. Our very first business plan called for us to publicly launch everything on January 1st, 2008. That didn’t happen. We pushed the launch date back to March 15th…and we pushed back the launch date to May 15th…once again I went back to the drawing board and came up with major changes… despite the fact that our official launch date has been pushed back repeatedly, our progress has been relentless.
It’s easy to stand on the outside and criticize, so let me just make what I hope is a constructive observation. If you have slipped four times you need to start to radically shrink the mission and focus for your first version.
The website. The Storytron website has quite a few special capabilities that require some custom programming. There’s nothing earth-shattering, to be sure, but it is not a collection of HTML pages. There’s a lot more going on underneath the hood. Louis has been doing lots of coding to make all this work properly, and Pati and Laura have been deeply involved in organizing the overall effort.
If a simple collection of HTML pages would make a “good enough” impression I would consider pushing out a dynamic website to a later version of the product/company. A basic demo has to be central to the mission, but they may be aiming much too high for their initial release.
The reference material and tutorials. This pile is huge. Worse, the technology it explains has been constantly changing. We made changes in April and May that required Pati to completely rewrite large portions of the tutorials. All in all, the content of the materials on the website adds up to about the size of a book — which Pati and Laura have generated in a matter of months.
It’s not clear what the changes were, but it doesn’t sound from the context they are keeping their focus on a simple app and demo for their first release. Again, hindsight is easier but if you find yourself re-writing the manual significantly before the product is in customers’ hands you should consider sharpening your focus and deferring features.
So how much longer will Storytron remain in vapor? How much longer will we give you promises that we later break?
If you find yourself worrying that prospects no longer believe you–and therefore no longer trust you–you need to change methods. Trust is hard to earn and too easily lost. I would think that they could sort their early users by risk tolerance and relevant technical skill levels and release the current “deficient” version to those it’s unlikely to turn off.
The board of directors discussed this matter at length at its recent meeting, and we hammered out the details of how we’re going to handle the launch. This time, though, we really want to be sure about our promises.
Again, you always want to be sure about your promises. One of Gerald Weinberg’s key observations for consultants and other change agents–and make no mistake about it, Chris and the Storytron team are trying to trigger a revolution in interactive entertainment–is that “people don’t tell you when they stop trusting you.” And once you’ve lost their trust, there is little basis for the kind of relationship that’s needed to convince early adopters to work with you.
Therefore, all we are saying at this time that the launch will NOT occur before August 18th. We are HOPEFUL that it will occur by September 1st. And that’s the best we can say at this time.
It’s better to give a “blood date” (vs. one written in pen, pencil, or crayon) and then work to beat it. It doesn’t sound like the team has a date that they are committed to hitting. This can be the death of many of promising start-up.
Please do not conclude that we couldn’t meet a deadline to save our lives. In every case, we have deferred the launch in order to improve the quality of our products. We could in fact have launched on January 1st, 2008, as originally planned — and the product we had ready at that time was better than what was originally planned.
This may be a slow death by good intentions. No development team ever slips a product to make it worse (in their own mind).
However, we deemed it to be unacceptable, so we pushed the deadline back.
As a rule of thumb the second time this happens you have to start to reduce the scope of your efforts and the mission you are trying to accomplish. In particular, bootstrappers have to sell what they have. Gordon Bell writes about the “Schedule Fantasy Factor” which he defines as the ratio of the time allocated to a particular task divided by the time it actually took. His belief is that a ratio above 1.2 puts a project in trouble: if it’s above 2 he believes that you are doing research, not product development.
The same thing happened in mid-March; Swat and Storyteller were better than we had expected back in January — but they still weren’t good enough. The changes we have been making have dramatically improved our technology. Yes, it’s frustrating to have to wait. You think you’re frustrated? However much you’re frustrated, I’m frustrated a lot more. But we only get one chance to show off to the venture capitalists, and we want to make this our best shot.
Normally the venture capitalist’s question is not “can you make this work?” but who wants to buy it, how much will they pay, and how many of them are there? Remember lesson 5, the real risk is not that you can’t ultimately do what you have set out to do, but that once you have a working technology you will discover that the market you anticipated for it does not exist. It’s a risk that many innovative start-ups face.
July 16th, 2008
What is an advisory board?
An advisory board is a formal or informal group of advisors who give advise, contacts, and feedback. Unlike the board of directors they do not have a fiduciary responsibility but are critical for start-ups. Also see Forming an advisory board.
How can they help me?
There are three broad ways that an advisory board can help you. The first is domain or technology knowledge. Secondly, industry knowledge advisors will understand the real ins and outs of how your market works and what the market needs are, they may also be able to open doors. Domain or technology folks maybe able to open door to potential partners and suppliers, but market knowledge folks maybe able to bring in the prospects or at least have you talk to people that prevent strategic misfires as you go into the market. And thirdly, if neither of the other two groups have been in a start-up before, it’s good to have at least one person either on your team or as an advisor who has rapid growth. So, if you are fortunate and you start to really takeoff, you have some somebody that helps you make decisions in a timely way and understands what to look out for and how to scale the company.
What do I give them?
Normally advisors which add credibility to your firm in a variety of ways, will trade expertise or services for equity.You typically are going to give them founders’ equity stock which is coming out of your pocket. It is frankly a negotiation, how much time they give you or how much equity they get, and that brings anywhere from 0.1% or 1%, in some very rare cases perhaps 2%, that’s the negotiation. Usually there is some kind of vesting schedule maybe on a 2-year or 3-year schedule with a 3 month or 6 month cliff. Because you want to make sure that things are working out, you don’t have a values’ conflict or getting value, you normally have a 3 or 6 month cliff. If things do not work out, then they walk away, they don’t get anything. During those early months
How do I use them?
You want to actually bring them together as appropriate to do at least a quarterly meeting, might be a phone call, might be a nice dinner. This time you can brief them on your business, dry run your demo, and get feedback on your plans. you would like to be to able get some introductions. They are a great source for contacts for employees, partners, prospects, or investment partners.
What do I ask of them?
- You are looking typically for 2 hours a month, 4 hours a quarter. Schedule either monthly, or twice a quarter, once a quarter formal meeting where you present a briefing for them. These become a proxy for your real board meetings until you have a real board of directors, this is a board of advisors.
- You want to be able to call them when urgent things come up. They are busy people, so you only want call for urgent things, but when urgent things come up, you want to be able to reach out to them.
- You want to negotiate use their name. You would like to announce in a press release that they have joined you, would like to be able to use their name on your website, you would like to be able to have folks call them to get their opinion of you, it might be investors or it might be a major prospect you are talking to.
Normally about two-thirds of that value is the advice they give you and one-third is the doors they open and the value that their reputation sheds on your company. VentureHacks has three relevant posts that are more focused on VC related issues than bootstrapping but still worth reviewing:
July 7th, 2008
I gave a talk on October 16 of last year at the KASE/KIN Entrepreneur Academy on “After Launch, Now What.” My theme was “What was once heroic must become routine” (podcast is here, it’s about 16 minutes if you would like to listen).
I was reminded of it when I came across the famous “This is Still a Start-Up” E-mail from June 2000 by Brendan Barnicle at MyLackey.com. Excerpts with my comments intermixed follow, along with some articles that detail how the story ended.
It is now 6:45 pm and there are only 12 people in our office. We have 65 people that work here in Seattle. This is totally unacceptable.
Barnicle is no stranger to hard work himself–he graduated cum laude with a B.A. in government from Harvard University and a J.D. from the University of Washington–but he seems unable to find the right words or policies to motivate his staff. Most importantly, he doesn’t put himself in the boat with them. It may be effective to criticize one or two individuals privately for poor performance, but when you start to berate the entire company via an e-mail it’s time to look in the mirror. Also, he is measuring an input (time in the office) not outputs. To build a successful start-up team you have to hold the team accountable for results, when you get too much into the “how” you may preclude them from finding a better way.
This company has far too much very important work to do to have virtually empty offices at 6:45 pm. If anyone thinks that everything we need to do as a company can be accomplished within an 8 hour day, then I think they fail to understand the scope and complexity of our venture. Anyone harboring such illusions should seriously consider a career change. I am sure that I could point to tasks for every single person in this company that would merit working past 7 pm every single night.
This for me is where he goes seriously off the rails. Now that MyLackey has launched and is scaling, what’s needed are systems and a business model that generates a profit without constant heroics on the part of the staff. They need scorekeeping mechanisms that are visible to everyone and allow each group to integrate their efforts into a profitable whole: dashboards and a workflow system that pinpoint what each person needs to be doing. By the time you reach a headcount of 65 you can’t have the CFO/co-founder running around telling everyone what to do. If you are a founder and find yourself exhorting everyone to work harder you should stop immediately and figure out what’s gone wrong.
We have an amazing lead on an outstanding business, but it will not last forever and we must move faster. As some of you know, we are lagging behind our revenue goals. We need everyone in every department working every day to meet and exceed these goals. We have similar goals in development, sales, business development, marketing, operations and every other aspect of our business.
What’s interesting is that at the time he is writing this, and certainly in subsequent conversations with his venture capitalists, he is asking for more money for expansion when he can’t get his Seattle operation profitable. I know that we have all learned the lessons of the dotcom era: expenses follow revenue, nothing new ever works, you can’t lose money on a product or service but make it up in volume.
This is not a bank; this is not Boeing. This is a start-up and we are all expecting to be rewarded for taking the risk of a start-up. But, there will be no rewards without exceptional effort.
There are normally only rewards for exceptional results. Effort and risk taking are necessary but only results are sufficient.
In transition from heroics you need a system that accumulates sustainable individual efforts in the same direction so that you actually get results. You can’t rely on heroics once you are scaling the company. If you are reading this blog you have probably left a big company where they had process, metrics, and dashboards and you are thinking to yourself “I don’t want anymore of that.” So as little of that as possible is probably a good idea, but just assuming that folks will do the right thing without guidance and feedback when there are more than a dozen on the team is a recipe for disaster.
Parts of the e-mail that was published were disputed as fabrications by MyLackey representatives. A provocatively titled article “Who Wants to Play ‘Which Dot-Com is Next to Die?‘” in the June 23rd 2000 Business Week (about a provocatively titled website) a paragraph was devoted to the MyLackey E-Mail, ending with:
A spokeswoman for MyLackey.com confirms that the e-mail did come from Barnicle, but says Kaplan’s posting of it had been “corrupted in some places.” She won’t elaborate on what that means.
An article in the June 22, 2000 edition of the Seattle Stranger entitled “The Boss’ Lackey”
A spokesperson for Mylackey, Howard Barokas, called the e-mail “bullshit,” saying it was a tampered version of Barnicle’s original message. Barnicle himself told The Seattle Times that forcing employees to work 10 1/2-hour days was not part of the original e-mail.
However, neither Barnicle nor Barokas disputed any other part of the tirade, including a warning that the company was “lagging behind” its “revenue goals.” Mylackey recently grabbed $6.5 million in funding to expand its operations in other cities.
A May 5, 2000 article in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer “MyLackey to use capital to enter 11 new markets” noted (Bold in original):
MyLackey.com competes against Seattle-based ServiceStop, Alexandria, Va.-based VIPDesk.com and Denver-based Concierge Confidant. Earlier this week, ServiceStop announced new vendor agreements with Wondermaids, Cookies By Design, Gordon Biersch, Malesis Flowers and White’s Mobile Detail, bringing the total number of vendors to 250. The company, which has 50 corporate customers in Seattle, also announced the opening of a new office in San Francisco.
Only VIPDesk.com survives today. Their business model allows educated people to work from home part time. A far cry from cleaning houses on demand. A Tue Oct 24, 2000 article announces the shutdown–probably inspired by some 9/11 induced sobriety since they hadn’t run out of money but realized that that didn’t have a business model that was profitable.
With a catchy name, an aggressive marketing campaign and $8 million in financing, MyLackey.com appeared to be a rising star in the Seattle Internet scene. But when it came time to make money, the online errand service fell far short. So co-founder Brian McGarvey made the unpleasant decision Friday to pull the plug on the business and lay off its entire staff of 85 employees. […]
MyLackey.com. The company, which raised a $6.5 million round of financing led by WaldenVC in April, could not persuade investors to provide more capital for the company’s expansion plans. So instead of blowing through the remaining cash, McGarvey and the executive team decided to close down.
“It has been a phenomenal ride,” said McGarvey, 32, who co-founded MyLackey.com just 16 months ago. “Of course, we could have done some things better. But who would have known. It had never been done before, and it wasn’t like there was a book you could open up for the answers.”
He said the company would not file for bankruptcy and employees will receive salaries for the rest of the month and benefits for the remainder of the year. “I still think this is a great idea and a great business,” said McGarvey, who is now consulting with Internet entrepreneurs. “But we just didn’t have enough time.”
Craig Weindling, owner of Smiley Dog pet food in Shoreline and a MyLackey.com service provider, said MyLackey.com is a classic example of a company that grew too big too fast. He said his 8-year-old company had opportunities to grow faster, but he refused to overextend the business.
“I don’t think the Internet companies are any different than other businesses,” said Weindling, whose three-member company is profitable. “If you don’t cover your bases, you ain’t going to make it.”
I am sorry to spend so much time recapping a dotcom era failure, but I encounter more and more entrepreneurs who are either unaware of, or oblivious to the lessons we all learned the hard way from 2001 to 20004 or so. We are a ways from a bubble, but too many folks seem to think an infusion of new capital will solve all of their problems, or that it’s the only thing holding them back.
June 30th, 2008
After I offered “7 Tips for Encouraging Bloggers to Write About a Conference,” Gabe Moretti, the editor of the DACeZine, asked me to contribute an article on blogging (I guess that could have been my eighth tip). It appeared in the June 26 DACeZine. What follows is a version of the article appropriate for a blog post: same content, more links. I think these tips are actually useful for any software start-up.
History & Definitions
Blogs are a “new” social software technology that have been in use for more than a decade. The name “weblog” was coined by Jorn Barger in 1997 and shortened to “blog” in 1999 by Peter Merholz. Both describe a website with one or more of the following characteristics:
- Permalink: each page or article has a permanent URL called a permalink that allows other sites to reference it uniquely for the life of the website. This inhibits link rot and allows useful references and backlinks to accumulate over time.
- Reverse Chron: there is normally an index that presents the articles in reverse chronological order (newest first) which answers the question “What’s New?”
- Comments: each article has a footer that allows readers to add comments. Registration can be required to inhibit spam, but in effect, each article can have a forum thread associated with it.
- Trackbacks: notifications to other blogs (and content management systems that accept them) that they have been referenced in a published article. These trackbacks may be appended as comments after the referenced article on the remote site to let readers know who else is referring to it.
- Categories: may be defined in an ad hoc way for a site and appended as tags (metadata) for each article. Sometimes, these tags may be shared between blogs to facilitate easy reference about common events or issues.
- Syndication Feeds: typically based on one or more versions of RSS and Atom, allow readers to aggregate content from many blogs. They are essentially a machine readable format of “What’s New” that tracks and displays a summary or the full text of the last few articles published.
- BlogRoll: a list of other blogs that are suggested reading by the blog author(s).
There are many blogging systems and not all of them support all of these features. Not every blog has all of these features enabled, but a minimum feature set would normally include permalinks, a reverse chronological index, and syndication feeds.
EDA Blogs
There are more than 70 blogs relevant to Electronic Design Automation, and the first “EDA Bloggers Birds of a Feather” meeting was held at this year’s DAC. As a part of the preparation for that event, I developed a list of “Bloggers Covering Electronic Design Automation” that David Lin of Denali published on Netvibes.
Starting the Conversation
Tim O’Reilly has observed that a blog acts as a dial tone for a website: it signals a commitment for interaction and participation on the part of the authors. Current blogging activity substantiates that a start-up is open for business. This can be an issue when the website has not been updated for six months!
EDA software and consulting services both require an ongoing relationship for a customer to get full value out of the initial decision to engage. This means that a purchase decision, especially for start-ups, can look a lot like a hiring decision. By exposing your thinking and demonstrating your expertise on your blog, you allow your prospects to get to know you better even before they write that first email or pick up the phone. Whether they see you listed at a tradeshow, see an article you’ve written, or hear about you from a colleague, they will almost always check your website before contacting you. If you let them get to know you and proactively answer their likely questions, you allow them to make more productive use of their time and make your first conversation that much more useful for both of you.
Key Benefits From a Blog
- Using permalinks for your content means that the highly linked articles accumulate a higher preference in search engines (e.g. Google) which means you are more likely to be found, especially if you are blogging about something of interest to your prospects.
- Using feeds means that new articles will get into the search engine caches, where they can be found by prospects; in a matter of hours rather than waiting for an indexing spider to visit your site every two or three weeks.
- A blog allows you to respond frequently and in real time to events, issues, and new information that are relevant to your prospects and your business. News releases still have a role but are better reserved for key communications.
- A blog also replaces the “What’s New” page for your website with a much more powerful structure that’s better connected with other websites.
Tips for Better Blogging
- Plan ahead. Map out a calendar of subjects to cover one or two a week for the next month or two; this will help you focus on these topics in other media and help you avoid writer’s block.
- Offer Perspective. Don’t just rehash other articles, blog posts, and news stories. Add your own insights and expertise—and keep the content clear, focused and professional.
- Report. Tie your subject matter to topical events such as talks, conferences, seminars, or trade shows you’ve attended, adding your own insights from those events.
- Focus for effect. Pick a set of topics that are relevant to your business and your (prospective) customers. (For non-business-related topics, create a second personal blog.)
- Do it often. Shorter, more frequent posts are best (around 200 to 400 words and at least once a week). Try making just three points per issue relevant to your intended audience.
- Choose clear titles. Keep titles short and use words that are familiar and relevant to your readers.
- Cite references. Include links for your citations to increase your credibility and make your blog more useful, reliable and better integrated into the blogosphere.
- Write with Integrity. Disclose all relevant information about your financial interests in the topic and only write what you know to be true.
June 5th, 2008
One of the most compelling and motivational speeches I ever heard when I was at Cisco was by John Morgridge in early 1994. The company had been growing very rapidly for several years and many employees were starting to view our success as inevitable. At a sales offsite Morgridge recounted a series of meetings he had held with prospects at InterOp (the big show for the networking world) and how each time he could look across the conference hall or the restaurant or the lobby and see Paul Severino, the CEO of Wellfleet (our arch-rival), talking to a different prospect or one of our customers. Morgridge observed that
“They may be beaten, but they don’t know that they are beaten, and they aren’t acting like they are beaten. Now, I am an old man, and I am doing what I can. But I need your help because I can’t do it alone.”
He put us all “in the box” with him: none of us would succeed unless we all picked up the pace. And Morgridge turned out to be correct, Wellfleet merged with Synoptics to form Bay Networks and continued to be a fierce competitor.
I remember similar remarks by Irwin Federman a decade earlier when I was working at Monolithic Memories. We were doing four day work weeks, well they weren’t actually four day work weeks, we were getting paid for four days but working five. At the time I thought it was a terrible alternative to a layoff because I hadn’t any experience with how wrenching and arbitrary and destructive and capricious most layoffs are. It was a company meeting where Irwin was outlining changes that we needed to make to become profitable enough to start paying people 5 days a week. And he closed with
“And I hope that you all act on this, because if you don’t, fewer of you will be listening to someone else next year at this time.”
A good leader puts himself in the same boat with his team, especially when times are tough.
April 28th, 2008
A couple of interesting variations on a theme. First off from a Hacker News comment by redorb in response to “Quit Your Job”
“Life is too short to work at a job you hate,
but everyone has to do something someone else is willing to pay them for.”
Sid Emmert
Bearing in mind Barry Moltz’s observation that “Entrepreneurs start businesses because..they have no choice. Passion and energy drive them on good days and sustain them on bad days.” We come to this gem from Evelyn Rodriguez
“Life’s Too Short To Stray Off Your Passion.” Evelyn Rodriguez
which titled a post that contains this observation attributed to James Michener:
The master in the art of living makes little distinction between his work and play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his information and his recreation, his love and his religion.
He hardly knows which is which.
He simply pursues his vision of excellence at whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing.
To him he’s always doing both.
It certainly sounds like a great prescription for happy entrepreneurial existence. Since entrepreneurship blends into (takes over?) much of the rest of your life, you might as well enjoy it, and pursue it in ways that are consistent with your values.
One final quote, this one from Benjamin Disraeli’s “Coningsby or the New Generation”
“Life is too short to be little. Man is never so manly as when he feels deeply, acts boldly, and expresses himself with frankness and with fervour.”
Rare is the entrepreneur who can keep his mouth shut or act in a half-hearted fashion: as Keith Herrmann observed about the corporate steeplechase “the difference between a good career and a great one is the ability to leave some things unsaid.” Bold action coupled with frank expression has inadvertently launched many a deeply felt entrepreneurial career.
And as life is too short for long blog posts I’ll stop this one here.
February 27th, 2008
Peter Cohan makes the following points in his Great Demo! Seminar
- C level execs think in terms of dollars (budget)
- Managers think in terms of people and full time equivalents (FTE).
- Individual contributors think in terms of time spent vs. time saved
So it pays to express the benefits of your application accordingly. There may be a few more dimensions we sometimes consider:
- Scrap and re-work: process oriented folks can focus on this, quality assurance as well if they aren’t considering just errors.
- Cycle time can also appeal to folks who understand how a more agile organization can win business and more rapidly respond to customers, events, and competitors.
- An existing cost stream. Especially in an uncertain economy, it’s always best to attack a cost stream that is real. Future revenues are a possibility, costs, especially recurring costs, are a tangible reality.
Note: we have another Great Demo! seminar coming up Saturday March 8 at the Moorpark Hotel in San Jose (near 280 and Saratoga Ave). If you’ve been before (or you want to stay for the afternoon) we are offering an advanced topics session from 1-5 PM at the same location.
February 22nd, 2008
Here are 10 common reasons to issue a press release.
- Announce a strategic partnership or alliance
- Issuing a statement on a hot issue
- New client acquisition
- Holding a seminar or workshop
- Availability of white paper or article
- Company revenue, sales, or profit
- Announce new member of board of directors or board of advisors
- invitation for a special offer
- Participation in local event or tradeshow
- Winning an award
Normally, I only do a top 3 list, but I thought there were a number of good reasons to issue a press release.
February 18th, 2008
An excerpt from W. H. Murray’s 1951 book, The Scottish Himalayan Expedition.
“Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. I have learned a deep respect for one of Goethe’s couplets:
Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it.
Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.”
I think that commitment fundamentally enables us to see possibilities. When Murray talks about “A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance” I think the decision to begin shifts our frame of reference, enabling us to see possibilities.
A variation on this theme is “burn your boats.”
One chapter that I have found very useful in the “Art of War” is “11. The Nine Situations” (bold added)
- Sun Tzu said: The art of war recognizes nine varieties of ground: (1) Dispersive ground; (2) facile ground; (3) contentious ground; (4) open ground; (5) ground of intersecting highways; (6) serious ground; (7) difficult ground; (8) hemmed-in ground; (9) desperate ground.
- When a chieftain is fighting in his own territory, it is dispersive ground. [So called because the soldiers, being near to their homes and anxious to see their wives and children, are likely to seize the opportunity afforded by a battle and scatter in every direction. “In their advance,” observes Tu Mu, “they will lack the valor of desperation, and when they retreat, they will find harbors of refuge.”]
- When he has penetrated into hostile territory, but to no great distance, it is facile ground. [Li Ch`uan and Ho Shih say “because of the facility for retreating,” and the other commentators give similar explanations. Tu Mu remarks: “When your army has crossed the border, you should burn your boats and bridges, in order to make it clear to everybody that you have no hankering after home.”]
Matthew 19:21-22 tells of a similar requirement for a serious commitment at the start of forming a team.
Jesus said to him, “If you wish to be perfect, go and sell your possessions and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.” But when the young man heard these words, he went away sad, for he was a man of great wealth.
“Burn your boats” has two meanings for me: get your team committed and pick battles that are worth it for you to win and not worth the trouble for major competitors to engage in. At the time you are getting your team formed, you must get them to make a serious commitment to success.
The concept of picking terrain for a battle that you can’t retreat from but that your competitors can does appear in Xenophon’s Anabasis in Book 6 Section 5
“For my part, I would rather at any time attack with half my men than retreat with twice the number.
As to these fellows, if we attack them, I am sure you do not really expect them to await us; though, if we retreat, we know for certain they will be emboldened to pursue us. Nay, if the result of crossing is to place a difficult gully behind us when we are on the point of engaging, surely that is an advantage worth seizing.
At least, if it were left to me, I would choose that everything should appear smooth and passable to the enemy, which may invite retreat; but for ourselves we may bless the ground which teaches us that except in victory we have no deliverance.“
I think the challenge is to commit to your new team without damaging past relationships. Prior shared successes always prove useful in new contexts: even if it’s not the current team it will be with the opportunities that your next success (or setback) creates.
My shorthand for this is burn their boats but not your bridges.
Some quick closing thoughts:
- My old Stanford professor, William Linvill, used to define a decision as “the irrevocable commitment of resources.” In that sense you haven’t really embarked on your strategy until your realize that you are committed.
- From “Soul Proprietor” in the August 2000 Fast Company
“Strategy is all about commitment,” says Tyler. “If what you’re doing isn’t irrevocable, then you don’t have a strategy — because anyone can do it. That’s why burning the boats is so important. I’ve always wanted to treat life like I was an invading army and there was no turning back.
- My father always liked to point out that “to not make a decision is to make a decision,” which is also one of the lessons from Boyd’s OODA loop (Observe - Orient - Decide - Act).
And now to end where we began: the folks at the Goethe Society have determined that Murray was working from a very loose translation of Faust 214-30 by John Anster:
Then indecision brings its own delays,
And days are lost lamenting over lost days.
Are you in earnest? Seize this very minute;
What you can do, or dream you can do, begin it;
Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.
which is also inspiring. Here is a poster of Murray’s quote for your office:
Caption reads “A reminder in the public interest from the do it now foundation www.doitnow.org
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