In new product development, in research, you WILL go down some dead ends. Accept it.
A twitter storm erupted recently in response to one person’s thread about how to find a 10x engineer . Since I started programming FORTRAN with punched cards back in 1974, was an industrial engineer in the 1980s and now run a software company, I’ve worked with a few people, rightly or wrongly considered to fall…
In my defense, the actual program is longer than this … <?php require ‘connect.php’; // Create variables ; $id = strtoupper(trim($_REQUEST[‘id’])) ; $application_date = $_REQUEST[‘yr_of_apply’] . “-” . $_REQUEST[‘month_of_apply’] .”-“. $_REQUEST[‘day_of_apply’] ; $assessment_date = $_REQUEST[‘yr_of_assess’]. “-” . $_REQUEST[‘month_of_assess’] .”-“. $_REQUEST[‘day_of_assess’] ; $eligibility_date = $_REQUEST[‘yr_eligible’].”-“.$_REQUEST[‘month_eligible’] .”-“. $_REQUEST[‘day_eligible’] ; $ipe_date = $_REQUEST[‘yr_ipe’].”-“.$_REQUEST[‘month_ipe’] .”-“. $_REQUEST[‘day_ipe’] ; $notify_rights =…
Anyone who tells you they know all of SAS is like that creepy guy at the fraternity party who swears that his father is the Duke of Canada, that is, they have a perception of themselves that is not in screaming distance of contact with reality. Even though I have been using SAS for decades,…
Last year, one of my very young doctoral students (who was single), commented in class that she was sure women with more education were less likely to get married. Two older women in the class agreed that was probably true because women with more education were less likely to settle for just any man who…
Hopefully, you have read my Beginner’s Guide to Propensity Score matching or through some other means become aware of what the hell propensity score matching is. Okay, fine, how do you get those propensity scores? Think about this carefully for a moment, if you are using quintiles, you are matching people by which group they…
Maybe I have been wrong. It wouldn’t be the first time, in fact, most of the really great things in my life have come about when I realized I was on the wrong track and took a sharp right turn. (Uncharacteristically skipping the opportunity here to make snarky comment about my first boyfriend, job or…
Transcript
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Accept the fact that you’re going to waste some time.
That’s some advice I give to young people starting businesses; you’re going to waste time and you’re going to waste money. I mean that in the sense that some things you do, you’re going to have to do over. In our company, we often will start on something, get a certain way down the path and realise “you know, we really don’t want to do that in Ruby, we’re going to start over”. What you hope is that you don’t get too far down the path before you decide you have to start over, but it’s inevitable. I think sometimes larger companies – that’s why I said yesterday I was so impressed that IBM had actually written that article on Just In Time Design – larger companies often are so risk averse, in the sense of “we don’t want to ever have to throw anything away that we did”, that they’ll spend an inordinate amount of time planning something out so they don’t have to justify that we spent all this money on something we never used.
In our case, we’ll go ahead, we’ll try it; if it doesn’t work then we quit doing it. If it does work then we do some more of it. Whether it’s paying somebody to do a logo, if it’s doing 2D programming and then saying we need a combination of 2D and 3D, if it’s creating one model for a teepee and saying “it’s too cartoonish” and throwing it out. You often don’t know those things in advance and you just need to accept that as you progress you’re going to realise that some of what you do initially doesn’t fit any more. And that’s just the way it is.
I think the modern day buzzword for this notion is “pivoting”.
This is a key advantage of small business: the ability to rapidly change / adapt faster than the big boys. We aren’t as plagued with process or formalities (or “escalation of commitment” to use an OB term).
While big companies have more financial resources, SBs have more “pivoting” ability, which is a huge resource. I’ve also found it to be a huge advantage that employees wear many hats in a SB and seem to care much more about the big picture … seeing the forest for the trees if you will, vs. the typical “that’s not my job” mindset of a big corp worker.
37signals is a great company to study. They’ve purposely kept employee count as small as possible. I recommend the book “Rework” by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson (the later of which is the inventor of Ruby on Rails).
Thank you, Phil, for the transcript. I’m going to have someone type the next one for me (stealing your idea) because I need to put it up for a student.
Thanks, Clint for the book suggestion. I’ll read it when I take off next week.
To entice you a little more, here’s an excerpt from “Rework”:
“A lot of people get off on solving problems with complicated solutions. Flexing your intellectual muscles can be intoxicating. Then you start looking for another big challenge that gives you that same rush, regardless of whether it’s a good idea or not.
A better idea: Find a judo solution, one that delivers maximum efficiency with minimum effort. Judo solutions are all about getting the most out of doing the least.
Whenever you face an obstacle, look for a way to judo it.”