Entrepreneurship

I'm just back from some excellent vacation time. As usual, I went to visit my family and friends in Buenos Aires for Christmas and New Year. Holidays season is perfect for this because we all have more time off, and also because it happens to be summer over there!

Needless to say, this time of the year is always very refreshing and revealing for me. I always come back full of energy and new ideas. Somehow, the distance from the day-to-day routine and responsibilities lets me [mostly involuntarily] set and analyze my goals, ideas and problems alike from another perspective, from another camera.

So here goes a list with my top 10 camera-changing strategies and exercises:

1. Go on vacations!

   
   

2. Change planes. No, not the flying ones. I meant the mathematical ones. Analyze the project from a different plane. Pick two variables and forget the rest. Then pick another two variables and repeat until you have a good understanding of all the different planes. The n-dimensional shape will become clearer as your brain blends all those planes, and you migh discover hidden places and shapes (combinations) you might not have thought about before.

   
   

3. Change time. Imagine, for a second, you only have half the time to implement your idea or finalize your project. Then imagine just the opposite, that you have double the time. By temporarily eliminating the time constraint, this will help you concentrate and get first the big picture, then the details at the same time on your mind. If a factor of two doesn't work well, try a bigger one.

   
   

4. Repeat 3. with other constraints (resources, budget, etc).

   
   

5. Explain your idea to a kid or teenager. Then write down the story. You will probably end up with either an executive summary, or an excellent marketing collateral.

   
   

6. Change roles. If you are the entrepreneur, imagine you are the customer. Then imagine you are the partner, the supplier, the investor, the consumer, the engineer, the marketer, the ... You will discover that each individual will see different n-dimensional representation of the problem or idea. Extra-ball: practice the other 9 ways for each role!

   
   

7. Change the problem. Try thinking about a bigger idea that encapsulates the original one. Then do the opposite, break down the idea or problem into a combination of smaller ones. Extra-ball: you are smart enough to discover it on your own!

   
   

8. Change the rules. Imagine a different market, a different objective, different players, different technology. For example, if you are trying to build a very profitable business, imagine your idea or problem on a non-for-profit environment. You will discover you can borrow some of those new ideas to contribute back in your original world.

   
   

9. Tell a few friends about your idea or problem. Ask them to concentrate, listen to you, ask any necessary questions and try to remember it. Then ask them, a few days later, to repeat it back to you. If there is no clear intersection between the different stories, that probably means the story isn't clear to you either. The differences will help you realize where you are failing. The solution: go through the other 9 points, then repeat this one until the intersection is significant.

   
   

10. Be a kid. Ask why. Then ask why again. You will be surprised to know how many people get it wrong. Most of the times, there is a bigger agenda behind it, a bigger why and a bigger reason. If you are not there yet, try to guess it. Once you get it, that's the real problem or idea you wanna think about. Imagine. Go a few years back in time and see the problem or idea as something you might do in the future. Think how would you prepare yourselve (and the world) for it. Then go forward in time and see it as something you did and how the world changed because of it. Then match the expectations from a past view with the results that would make you happy from the future view. Re-set your goals and repeat.

    
    

I was first introduced to The Flow (as such) sometime ago at a leadership training. It goes more or less like this:

The concept (apparently borrowed from psychology) states that, when you are faced with a problem, project or activity challenging enough so that you use a significant percentage of your skills and analytical horsepower, you will enjoy doing it. You enter The Flow state of mind, where you may loose track of time. You will be very focused and get less distracted by insignificant details and the outside world. This happens to professional runners when racing, to chess grand masters during a good game, to programmers when coding a complex algorithm not found in any book, to professional golfers during a good round, to researchers when developing that new exciting theory.

Facing an excessive challenge for which you are not prepared enough could get you frustrated or stressed. On the other end, working on something which doesn't exploit your skills or talents will probably get you bored or unmotivated.

If you are a good leader, you will do everything you can to have all your team members in The Flow zone, at least most of the time. You will also make sure to develop your team and keep giving them bigger or different challenges every time. If you are a good mother or father, you will want your kids to experience this as often as you can (of course, they need to play too!).

Building up. My take on The Flow.

There are some persons, however, that do not like challenges as much. They don't need to progress. These are type-B persons. Bs stay wherever their comfort zone is and don't move up in the graph. They are usually the same ones who fear (and oppose to) change. They like the status quo, they are happy to stay with what they know or have and are afraid to try anything new or take any risks. They can be average runners, but will never become professional runners, because it takes too much effort to get there and there is no guarantee of success. They don't get bored doing repetitive left-brain tasks. They don't like the idea of learning from their own mistakes.

Then, there are As. They need be challenged all the time. They are always trying to go up in the graph and don't like to stay where they are. They are ambitious. They can't stand not using their right-brain. They become stars at whatever they do (they won't do something they can't thrive at, at least not for long). They are always learning, reading, teaching and developing their skills. They keep taking bigger challenges every time. They know what their talents are, and exploit them as much as they can. These are excellent programmers, writers, leaders, entrepreneurs, researchers, professional runners, golfers, chess masters, you name it. They learn from their mistakes.

In some (most?) organizations, there are jobs designed for both As and Bs. They claim they need Bs (pun intended) to do those B jobs (that As won't take), and that those B jobs are necessary for the business to run well. They sometimes put As to do B jobs and vice-versa. Consequences are usually pretty bad.

What they don't get is, they probably experience these problems because the people that designed the organization, processes and roles did the mistake at the first place. Or they hired the wrong guy. Why have B employees? Why have B jobs? What's the value of a B job? Can they buy that service or product from someone else? Can they create a new, different process? Or use innovative technology that automates it? Can they outsource it to another company that can?

Bad processes and ideas stick around for long time because they are hard to change (probably because of the same type-B employees?) once they become the standard way of doing things. In the Software Engineering discipline, it is well known that a mistake during the requirements gathering, analysis or design phase will be much more costly to fix than a mistake on the implementation phase (aka bug). I claim that this rule is also valid when designing businesses, organizations, processes and roles (it also applies to, for example, building houses).

When starting a new team or small business, is there a way to design the organization and its processes so that there are no type-B jobs?

Are you a type-A or type-B person? Do you like working with Bs? Bs are usually boring, because they tell the same story every time.

I admit, there are some bad generalizations here. They are a cheap way to induce your comments and also to make my point. In reality, matching roles and their challenges with employee skills and talent is tough and it is not an A or B binary problem. But it is the willingness to improve, to develop and to take different and bigger challenges everytime that makes the big difference.

Besides this generalization, is there a way to combine employees, jobs, processes, projects and roles so that challenge, skill, knowledge, talent, analytical horsepower, creativity, potential and human capital investment and development all come together to an optimal maximum?

In the Flat World, and when Small is the new big, is there a point in creating a small business that will need hire type-B employees? I don't think so!

So be small, dream, think and design big, then thrive implementing it with As. Now go change the world!

Imagine for a second that you go into your favorite restaurant and find a completely new soda dispenser machine. Not that old one you are used to, but a completely brand-new design which is plugged into the web. At first, it looks a bit futuristic, it doesn't have any triggers to pull your favorite soda, but instead a large touch screen.

From the screen, you can select one of three options:

1) Create your own personalized soda/juice mix:

Will take you to a menu where you can select exactly which percentage you want (let's say, in increments of 5%) of each ingredient. There are probably about 10 or 15 different ingredients. So, to illustrate, something in the lines of: give me 15% of this cola, 15% of this other one, 50% orange juice and 20% mango juice. Once you are done, the machine will prepare your mix, but will also let you save it under a nickname of your choice. So you can type in this is my "Seb01" mix. The machine will give you back a ticket with a number that uniquely identifies yourselve.

You can later go to a social 2.0-ish website where you can login with that number and see how "Seb01" is doing. You can link it to your profile and write your own comments about it. You can link your profile to your personal blog or myspace address. Other people can order a "Seb01" from any of the machines in the "web" of cool restaurants and places having this new kind of machines. You can tell your friends to try it out, and you could "perfect" it little by little (Seb02, ...) They can also login into the website and post comments or recommend your "Seb01" drink to their friends, and they can also see the components inside "Seb01" (so they can experiment with variations of their own).

2) Select from most popular mixes:

You will get a menu with the 10 most popular mixes. Mixes get more and more popular depending on how many people drink them, how many people read about them on the site, post a comment about them, "digg" or "dugg" them, you-get-the-point. You also have a place where you can type "Seb01", even if it is not the most popular one, you can still order it if you've heard about it!. There might also be a menu with the less popular ones, the most exotic ones ("different" ones), etc.

3) Select from the existing "boring" commercial mixes:

Here you can get your boring 100-years old mix that has been there forever. Or may be you can also find new ones being pushed by known brands so that you can try them out.

There are a few more twists:

a) All personalized mixes formulas are in the public domain (exept may be for some of their ingredients from the machine). The company having these machines could also commercialize your popular creation in cans, etc without owing you any royalties or license fees, but you could also do exactly the same.

b) If you get to author a popular mix, the company will give you some incentives, gift, or may be hire you!

c) The social site could also collect some ad-related revenues, subscription fees to extended services, etc.

OK... I'm running out of ideas right now. It seems to me this would be really cool, but mostly for kids and teenagers. Some adults may also enjoy it.

Another twist: The futuristic bar. Where you can sit down and have your display on what you want to mix in your own cocktail (alcoholic or not), and everybody can also see on their displays what everyone else is mixing and drinking ... you can also enter your profile (...), save it, etc. There could be a "web" of these futuristic bars, where again the same ideas apply: a social 2.0-ish website puts them together and creates a world-wide phenomen... You can send IM messages to other people if they are in another bar, or you can just go talk with the people there... so many possibilities... The site also has videos from different bars and locators to other bars in the "web", should it happen that you are travelling.

I'll post this one on the Entrepreneurship category. Simply because I believe these are particular examples of some broader, more general ideas behind it...

The Austin American-Statesman published today on their Tech Monday section a small article mentioning the adquisition of Perseus Development Corp. and WebSurveyor Corp. by Austin Ventures.

Both companies are now listed at the Austin Ventures' Information Services page under Growth Equity portfolio. They will be combined and led by Dean Wiltse, former CEO of Greenfield Online. GreenField Online has MSD Capital as one of their investors.