December 16th, 2011 11:38am
Theresa Shafer
Chapter 2:
Discovery Skill #1 Associating
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The Innovator’s DNA
by Jeff Dyer, Hal Gregersen, Clayton M. Christensen
Practical and provocative, The Innovator’s DNA is an essential resource for individuals and teams who want to strengthen their innovative prowess.
The authors outline five discovery skills that distinguish innovative entrepreneurs and executives from ordinary managers: Associating, Questioning, Observing, Networking, and Experimenting.
Our first discussion will focus on Chapter 2: Discovery Skill #1 Associating
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Additional Book Reviews
December 14th, 2011 11:36pm
Sean Murphy
“If you’re doing something big, people will compliment you. Most will give you accolades or be quietly supportive. But it’s those who simultaneously support and challenge you who can help. The best teams know this. They embrace feedback and seek criticism. They find ways to change and improve. And they know that when someone criticizes them, it’s an indication of respect. Only the people who really care risk helping us improve. ”
Brendan Baker in “Seek Knowledgeable Criticism” h/t to Rafe Needleman
Your startup is a work in progress. When most entrepreneurs evaluate where they are it’s difficult not to include the promising future they foresee naturally ensuing from current efforts (or on bad days the certain doom no matter what they do).
The first self-assessment to make is “do we have traction?” By traction I mean the ability to set and hit goals that increase your knowledge of the market or reduce the risks associated with becoming viable. There are many milestones that are necessary to enable a real goal that in and of themselves don’t increase your knowledge of the market or reduce the risks associated with viability. Some examples:
- Getting incorporated, registering a domain, getting a bank account, getting a Federal Tax ID, etc.. These are all important steps to be able transact business that no one on your team may be familiar with, but they are not goals. They don’t reduce your risk or increase your knowledge of the market.
- Spending money on tools, equipment, services, etc… You may never have hired an attorney or an accountant before or setup an account on a cloud service , and it’s possible to pick the wrong person or provider, but it does not reduce your risk.
If you don’t have traction you need then zoom in and narrow your focus. Ask for specific advice on how to understand the market opportunity, verify that you have identified the key risks that you face in the near term, and how to reduce or minimize one or more risks that you face. Here the most helpful criticism can take the form of questions:
- How are we measuring … how far have we come since…
- Who are we benchmarking our progress against and why?
- What have we already tried to solve this problem and what has been the result? What have we learned?
- What is the real problem that we are trying to solve?
- What can we accomplish in the next two to three weeks with the folks already committed to the team.
These questions can provoke a conversation that can help you form a plan of action for the next few weeks that will improve your traction. Once you have that plan you can present it to friends and advisors for feedback and critique.
The second self-assessment to make, if you are satisfied that you have traction is to determine what are the next set of realistic goals that, once achieved, will significantly enhance your viability or impact for your customers. Now is the time to zoom out and consider a broader context for your next set of actions. Here the most helpful criticism can take the form of different questions:
- How close are we to your next goal? What should we start measuring once we achieve it? What metrics no longer matter or are now counterproductive?
- What relationships have we created that can now help you grow your business?
- What are the most significant constraints on our growth or ability to add value to customers?
- What problems have we promoted in solving the ones that we faced earlier?
- What core values do we need to hold on to as we grow?
- What specialists do we need to add to the team on a temporary, part time, or full time basis?
Once you have those answers reviewing them with customers, partners, and advisors can yield additional insight.
December 13th, 2011 03:18pm
Sean Murphy
“Every so often—every 60 years or so—a body of technology comes along and over several decades, quietly, almost unnoticeably, transforms the economy: it brings new social classes to the fore and creates a different world for business…something deep is going on with information technology, something that goes well beyond the use of computers, social media, and commerce on the Internet.”
Brian Arthur in “The Second Economy“
Anne Rozinat is co-founder of Fluxicon, a provider of software tools and services for business process mining. She has project experience with a number of major European firms in customer service, healthcare, IT services, healthcare and government. Her training is in software engineering with a PhD in Process Mining and she is a founding member of the IEEE Task Force on Process Mining.
She is joining us on Wed-Dec-14 at Noon PDT to discuss Brian Arthur’s “The Second Economy” article in the October 2011 McKinsey Quarterly.
“Business processes that once took place among human beings are now executed electronically. They are taking place in an unseen domain that is strictly digital. This shift is quietly creating a second economy, a digital one.”
Brian Arthur in “The Second Economy“
In addition to her published research and her private client work Anne is an active blogger and has several posts that bear on Brian Arthur’s “Second Economy” thesis:
“In any deep transformation, industries do not so much adopt the new body of technology as encounter it, and as they do so they create new ways to profit from its possibilities.”
Brian Arthur in “The Second Economy“
In the same way that computer networks required much more sophisticated network management and systems administration tools and methodologies, the increased digitization of business processes–blending automation with human expertise in extremely complex workflows–will require us to invent new tools and methods for specifying and managing them.
“This second economy that is silently forming—vast, interconnected, and extraordinarily productive—is creating for us a new economic world. How we will fare in this world, how we will adapt to it, how we will profit from it and share its benefits, is very much up to us.”
Brian Arthur in “The Second Economy“
Our hope is that conversation will touch on impacts, risks, and some early examples:
- Understand Pervasive Impact of Process Digitization on Business
- Key Risk Is to Make Work Processes Invisible
- Complicates “Management By Walking Around”
- New Tools & Practices Needed to Leverage
- Early Example: Amazon’s Mechanical Turk
- Blends Automation and Human Expertise
- Creating New Kinds of Business Models
Please Register and join the roundtable discussion Wed-Dec-14 at Noon PST.
December 9th, 2011 06:41am
Sean Murphy
We have been facilitating Bootstrappers Breakfasts® since 2006 in Silicon Valley. Our promise is serious conversations about growing a business based on internal cash flow and organic profit. This is not for entrepreneurs who want to meet VCs–there are plenty of meetings in Silicon Valley that already enable those conversations–this is for founders who are actively bootstrapping a technology startup.
We define bootstrapping as growing your business based on organic cash flow, not seeking outside funding until you have an opportunity that both requires and merits outside investment.
Here is a list of the next set of breakfasts scheduled in Silicon Valley
Cost is $5 in advance / $10 at the door plus the cost of your own breakfast (separate checks). Check us out over the holidays if you want an early morning conversation with other technology entrepreneurs.
November 30th, 2011 01:23pm
Sean Murphy
You can follow @skmurphy to get these hot off the mojo wire or wait until the end of the month when they are collected on the blog. Enter your E-mail if you would like Feedburner to deliver new blog posts to your inbox.
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“To give real service you must add something which cannot be bought or measured with money, and that is sincerity and integrity.”
Donald A. Adams
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“Abbot Zerchi smiled thinly. ‘You don’t have a soul, Doctor. You are a soul. You have a body, temporarily.’”
Walter M. Miller “A Canticle for Leibowitz“
hat tip to “My Small Boat” blog.
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“Advice is like snow; the softer it falls, the longer it dwells upon, and the deeper it sinks into the mind.”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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“If you do not expect the unexpected, you will not find it; for it is hard to be sought out and difficult.”
Heraclitus (Fragment 18)
I used this as the opening quote for “Customer Interviews: Allow Yourself to Be Surprised”
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“When someone makes a decision, he is really diving into a strong current that will carry him to places he had never dreamed of when he first made the decision.
Paulo Coelho “The Alchemist”
I used this as a coda to Customer Interviews: Allow Yourself To Be Surprised
h/t to Johnnie Moore’s “Decisions” where he offers this additional insight:
“People are easily preoccupied with the idea of making a decision as if it’s all about creating certainty. What it’s more about embarking on an adventure? And if it is, are we looking to pressgang the crew or are we taking willing volunteers?”
Johnnie Moore
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“I need to get some sleep. People on the Internet will still be wrong tomorrow.”
Jim Treacher
A riff on xkcd’s “Duty Calls” that I used for Late Night Comments and E-Mail” but Treacher offers better advice.
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“The long tail is for organizations that own warehouses.”
Seth Godin in “The Starfish and the Long Tail Have Trouble Getting Along“
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“We are responsible for actions performed in response to circumstances for which we are not responsible” Allan Massie
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“When in doubt, choose to go deeper rather than faster. Accept the idea that reflection and understanding your own nature, including the dark side, is the key to effective action.”
Peter Block in “The Answer to How is Yes“
I used this quote to close “Record to Remember, Pause to Reflect”
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“Not only should you calculate the Lifetime Value of your customers, but also their perception of the Lifetime Value of your solution.”
Chris Hopf
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“Health is not valued till sickness comes.”
Thomas Fuller
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“We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures.”
Thornton Wilder
I used this as the opening quote for my Thanksgiving 2011” post.
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“Without a clear vision of the goal state, I expect movements to devolve into identifying enemies and engaging in wars.”
Jason Yip
I took this to relate to the Lean Software, Lean Startup, Agile Software movements because those are the topics he commonly blogs about.
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“We are confronted with insurmountable opportunities.”
Walt Kelly in “Pogo“
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“Work while you have the light. You are responsible for the talent that has been entrusted to you.”
Henri Frederic Amiel
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“To achieve great things, two things are needed; a plan, and not quite enough time.”
Leonard Bernstein
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November 29th, 2011 10:23pm
Sean Murphy
On Wed Nov. 30 from 6-8pm, we are brainstorming with some folks about forming a mastermind group for technology firms. We want to take stock and evaluate what will impact our bottom line. Join us for the upcoming Open House. Bring your 2012 plans and let’s brainstorm on what this mastermind meetup could be.
If you are looking for a group of peer entrepreneurs to compare notes with on your business on a regular basis this may be of interest to you. You can register at http://www.meetup.com/BayAreaMastermind/events/39869532/
We are meeting at
Pacific Business Centers
1250 Oakmead Parkway Suite 210, Sunnyvale, CA
November 25th, 2011 11:27pm
Sean Murphy
Innovative user interfaces have helped a number of products get adopted, here are three examples to stimulate your thinking.
1. Interview Metaphor: early tax preparation software automated a literal view of the paper forms. Intuit, I believe, was first to switch to an interview format that captured the information in a way that was easier to understand and manage/update. This was a clever reconceptualization of the problem that has been widely adopted. It was “better” in the sense that it was more easily understood by a consumer who only filled out one tax return a year.
2. Treemaps: developed by Ben Shneiderman compress a lot of information on quantifies that differ by orders of magnitude and are more useful at presenting it than bar charts or pie charts. One of the more successful examples is Smart Money Magazine’s “Map of the Market” which you now have to subscribe to see. Some references
3. Tornado charts: also called Tornado Diagrams, these are a compact visualization of the impact of different variables on the outcome of a sequence of decisions (or a decision tree). In decision analysis they obsoleted tables of numbers and probability distribution plots, offering a succinct encapsulation of the relative potency of a number of control or input variables. They have migrated over time from an esoteric technique in specialized software tools to one easily generated in Excel.
I don’t have specific suggestions for how to develop better ones beyond asking prospective customers how they represent the problem: what metaphors, paper aids, and mental models are useful in managing the problem they might hire your application to solve. One author worth reading this is Edward Tufte: he has written four beautiful and insightful books on presenting information:
He periodically offers a one day course that presents material from all four of these books.
November 24th, 2011 12:44am
Sean Murphy
“We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures. ”
Thornton Wilder
It’s very early in the morning on Thanksgiving Day and I wanted to reprise my short list of what I am thankful for; it’s been the same for the last few years:
- Health
- Family
- Friends
- Opportunity
It’s been a difficult year for health, but only because I have finally had to sit down to my “banquet of consequences.” As I tell people when they ask me how I am doing: “I remain above ground and moving around, and intend to continue to do so for another three or four decades.”
My younger brother turned fifty last month and posted this short note to friends and family:
“Thanks for all the birthday wishes. I’d like to respond to everybody but it’s now officially past my bedtime. I hope to be an ever gushing fount of wisdom now that I’ve dedicated myself to the pursuit of excellence for a half century. I’ll leave with this thought – the first chunk of adulthood was an adventure because I had no idea what was coming, but sadly I know what’s coming for the second chunk.”
It reminded me in a strange way of Achaan Chaa’s answer to Mark Epstein’s question “what do you mean by ‘eradicating craving’?”
“You see this goblet?
For me, this glass is already broken.
I enjoy it; I drink out of it. It holds my water admirably, sometimes even reflecting the sun in beautiful patterns. If I should tap it, it has a lovely ring to it.
But when I put this glass on a shelf and the wind knocks it over or my elbow brushes it off the table and it falls to the ground and shatters, I say, ‘Of course.’
But when I understand that the glass is already broken, every moment with it is precious.”
Mark Epstein’s Thoughts Without a Thinker (pages 80-81)
Which is the way that that this year has left me feeling. that the second half of my life has started and it’s time to appreciate all that I have and be more forthcoming in my gratitude to everyone who has touched my life so far.
Your mileage may vary but that’s my plan.
“Ancient Greeks defined happiness as the exercise of vital powers, along lines of excellence, in a life affording them scope.”
Edith Hamilton in “The Greek Way“
November 23rd, 2011 02:53pm
Theresa Shafer
Create and Deliver Surprisingly Compelling Software Demonstrations
“Do The Last Thing First” — the recipe for a Great Demo!
When: Wednesday, February 29, 2012 8 am – 5 pm
Where: Moorpark Hotel, 4241 Moorpark Ave, San Jose CA 95129
For out of town attendees: The Moorpark is located 400 feet from the Saratoga Ave exit on Hwy 280, about 7 miles from San Jose Airport and 35 miles from San Francisco Airport Hotels Near Great Demo! Workshop
Cost: $620
Before Feb. 8: $590
This is an interactive workshop with Peter Cohan geared especially for you who demonstrate B-to-B software to your customer and channels. Bring a copy of your demo and be prepared to present it — we’ll help you turn it into a surprisingly compelling demo!
This seminar outlines a framework for the creation and delivery of improved demos and presentations to enable increased success in the marketing, sale, and deployment of software and related products. Whether it’s face to face, in a webinar, as a screencast, or as a self-running demo the ability to present the key benefits of your software product is essential to generating prospect interest and ultimately revenue. Peter Cohan of The Second Derivative gives us the recipe for a Great Demo!
“I am confident that with the insights gained from your workshop we will land more customers in fewer iterations.”
Lav Pachuri, CEO, Xleron Inc.
“Peter Cohan’s Great Demo method really works. It helped us win DEMOgod, and it has allowed us to explain our offering much more clearly to prospects.”
Chaim Indig, CEO, Phreesia
(See “DEMOgod Winner Phreesia Praises Peter Cohan Training“)
ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Peter Cohan, Principal at Second Derivative
Community Web Site: www.DemoGurus.com
Peter Cohan is the founder and a principal of The Second Derivative, a consultancy focused on helping software organizations improve their sales and marketing results. In July 2004, he enabled and began moderating DemoGurus®, a community web exchange dedicated to helping sales and marketing teams improve their software demonstrations. In 2003, he authored Great Demo!, a book that provides methods to create and execute compelling demonstrations. The 2nd edition of Great Demo! was published March 2005.
Before The Second Derivative, Peter founded the Discovery Tools® business unit at Symyx Technologies, Inc., where he grew the business from an empty spreadsheet into a $30 million operation. Prior to Symyx, Peter served in marketing, sales, and management positions at MDL Information Systems, a leading provider of scientific information management software. Peter currently serves on the Board of Directors for Collaborative Drug Discovery, Inc. and the board of advisors for Excellin, Inc. He holds a degree in chemistry.
Peter has experience as an individual contributor, manage and senior management in marketing, sales, and business development. He has also been, and continues to be, a customer.
Agenda:
- 8:00 AM Breakfast & Registration
- 8:15 AM Workshop begins
- Noon Lunch
- 1 PM Workshop Continues
- 5 PM Wrap up
Seating is Limited These are intensive sessions and we ask that you arrive at least 15 minutes before 8:30AM start time to ensure you will have a seat and won’t disrupt the session once it is underway.
For more information: Theresa 408-252-9676 events@skmurphy.com
November 22nd, 2011 03:37pm
Sean Murphy
Q: I am having trouble getting people to fill out my customer discovery surveys, how many do I need to be statistically significant.
I think the following approaches burn time and social capital without generating much in the way of insight:
- Using surveys for “customer discovery.”
- Landing pages for signups where little if any information is provided about the team or product but many answers are required of a prospective user to signup.
- Launchrock style landing pages that require your prospects to invest their credibility by tweeting, blogging, or otherwise announcing their interest in your offering to their friends before you give them access to your beta. This is destroying the value of any endorsement you might ever generate.
One conversation is worth between 100 and 10,000 survey responses. Provided you are listening and prepared to be surprised.
A dozen to two dozen conversations with relevant and knowledgeable individuals will put you will be well ahead of any survey based approach.
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