Entrepreneurial Traits and Cricketers: Aggression

Aggression must be backed up by muscle (capability). Bluster, or posturing, will land you in trouble (read that as "You will get slapped by Bhajji and end up weeping on national TV":-)

In my experience of delivering software, an aggressive attitude in committing to customer demands, that does not take into consideration actual capability, will result in poor quality of deliverables, missed schedules, an unsustainable work process (heroics cannot be performed on a 24 x 7 basis)  and finally angry customers. I would much rather under-promise and over-deliver and have a sustainable process.

Having said that, sometimes heroics are called for. The operative word there is sometimes never 24 x 7. Stretch is fine, but beware of stretching beyond the elastic limit.

Set Big Hairy Audacious Goals (BHAGs) but read this before doing so.

Set a target "to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade" but only if you have already build successful ICBMs.

This is the final post on "Entrepreneurial Traits and Cricketers"

Entrepreneurial Traits and Cricketers: Focus

One of the traits mentioned in the first post in these series was focus.

Problem with focus is it can get too narrow. That leads to tunnel vision. Or it can be too broad to the extent that everything is in focus - something like a wide angle lens

Let me give an analogy. Search and Track are two operating modes of radar systems mounted on modern fighter aircraft. The radar is capable of switching between both modes at a high frequency. Given the rate at which the scenario changes the effect is of simultaneous search and track. For tracking a target, preparatory to firing its weapons, the weapons system uses a narrow focused beam. For being aware of other aircraft in its vicinity - friendly or hostile - it uses the search mode which is much broader, far less focused, beam.

An entrepreneur needs both a narrow tracking beam to lock on and track her target and a broad scanning beam to tell her of likely threats, and collateral opportunities.

How broad is broad? How narrow is narrow? Depends on the market dynamics. That's what makes entrepreneurship fun!

Entrepreneurial Traits and Cricketers: Fear is Good

In my ealier post ,  I said that fearlessness is one of the traits that Dr Nandini mentions in her article in the "Entrepreneur".

I believe it is the ability to overcome one's fears, to not let fear cloud one's thinking, and not the absence of fear, that is important. And that requires training. And faith in one's capabilities developed through training.

Fearlessness is doing a trapeze act, without having trained for it.

As Andy Grove's book title says, "Only The Paranoid Survive". But it is paranoia that is under control, as he explains in the preface.

You need fear, "kyunki", as the ad for a soft drink has it, "Dar ke agey jeet hai" - because success lies on the other side of fear.

Entrepreneurial Traits and Cricketers

Last week, on a flight to Delhi, I was reading the February issue of the Entrepreneur. The lady in the aisle seat enquired if I was an entrepreneur and we got talking. She mentioned that she writes a regular feature in the magazine. The issue that I was reading had an article by her on entrepreneurial traits and styles of some Indian cricketers. The lady is Ms Nandini Vaidyanathan.

I have thought about her article for the past few days.

The article lists 11 traits:

1. Focus - Gambhir, 
2. Fearless - Sehwag, 
3. Reliable - Dravid, 
4. Outside the box (Nandini calls it "Do the impossible") - Laxman, 
5. Genius - Tendulkar, 
6. Leadership - Ganguly, 
7. Street fighter (Nandini calls it scrappy) - Dhoni, 
8. Identity - Irfan Pathan as an example of losing one's identity, 
9. Resilience - Kumble, 
10. Adaptability - Harbhajan, and finally 
11. Aggression - Sreesanth.

 Cricketers at this level have been playing the game since they were kids. They have had time to experiment with styles. They have varied their heroes. They have learned whether they were speedsters, or leg spinners, or off spinners, openers or middle order, close in fielders or outfielders. In short they have had a long time to discover their identity. They have had time to discover if they should pursue cricket, or become an engineer, or in some cases both. Except, of course, a prodigy like Sachin. Prodigies do not require time to discover themselves.

Entrepreneurs, largely, start much later in life. By that time their traits have been set. What is worse is that most entertain wrong notions of their traits. To discover their identity they need to go and play "gully cricket". But then scoring "ducks", or getting hit for "sixes" in "gully cricket" is very bruising for the self-image - also the pocket. A mentor, someone like Ms Nandini, can be of great help.

In subsequent posts I will write about some of the traits.

ADHAAR The UID Project

Believe the Hype by Thomas Friedman illustrates the grass-roots innovation opportunities that exist in India.

A few posts ago I mentioned that I attended the session on governance at the PAN-IIT 2010. My reason for doing so was that Nandan Nilekani was to speak about ADHAAR, the UID project that he is heading.

What the project is going to do is to allot a UID to every citizen after recording iris patterns and fingerprints. These will be maintained in a database. I suppose other data too would be maintained.

The database could be queried for delivering services to the citizen. I am sure it is going to open up new business opportunities.

Innovation: RoI

R & D need not be restricted to the parent company's business. R&D at Xerox is not. That is why they let Steve Jobs exploit PARC's innovations.

Constraints & Opportunities

Seth Godin has a post on Problems & Constraints.

Problems are within one's power to solve. Constraints are not. Constraints belong to the environment.

Problems are "pain points", the solutions to which are addressed by business plans. Constraints have to be catered for in the business plan.

But all constraints are not a law of nature like gravity. The earth will never become flat (not at least in a non-cosmological time frame). The world can, and has, become flat.

Technology, regulatory systems, social mores, demography, modify, or remove, constraints. Those who can spot the coming change in constraints, and have the capability to quickly ready themselves for it, can use it to their advantage.

Peter Drucker said that whenever distribution channels change, opportunities arise. The internet, not withstanding the dot-com bubble, has changed the way goods and services are distrubuted. That is what enabled Apple to change its business model - removal of a constraint.

Innovation: Staffing

Govindarajan & Trimble , as mentioned in an earlier post, describe the Performance Engine and the Dedicated Team and why they should be distinct. The book also mentions the need to have a proper relationship between the two so that the resources, skills and knowledge of the Performance Engine can be effectively leveraged.

Context To Core
Geoffrey Moore, in his book Dealing with Darwin: How Great Companies Innovate at Every Phase of Their Evolution, speaks of the need to allocate from Context to Core. Context consists of whatever the company needs to do to stay in the game. Core is what the company needs to do to stay ahead in the game - and that is innovate. (Watch video of Geoffrey Moore on Context and Core in the Software Industry). However, Geoffrey Moore does not deal with the barriers to allocating from Context to Core and how to overcome them. Govindarajan & Trimble do that.

Moonlighting
Givindarajan & Trimble advise against trying to do worthwhile innovation with people working in their slack time. It is not as if such "moonlighting" cannot come up with ideas or small victories, or incremental improvements. What they fail at is, in the words of the book's title, "the other side of Innovation".

Concerning Startups: There are startups where the "entrepreneurs" are not entrepreneurial enough to quit their regular jobs. Such a startup is is not a place to be employed; nor are these people to be doing business with. At acmet we dealt with one such firm.

Missing Performance Engine
I mentioned in an earlier post that a startup, unlike an established organizatiion,  has a Dedicated Team with no associated Performance Engine. It has its advantages; it is not burdened by the past. But that is also a disadvantage. The startup does not have a brand. It does not have a set of customers who trust it.

Mitigation: These diadvantages can be mitigated, to an extent, if the entrepreneurs have worked in the industry in various roles - production, product development, marketing & sales. They should be known within the industry and to customers who use the products and services of the industry.

When RR & I started Ergo Electronics we lacked this. We could have overcome this disadvantage. I suppose hubris prevented us, both then, and later at acmet, from never really being able to so.

Postscript
With this post I have ended my current set of takes on Govindrajan & Trimble's book.

If you work at an established company, the book will help you understand what your company needs to do if wants to innovate. Maybe you could suggest what needs to be done, and why.

If you intend to start a venture, or are already in one, I hope my posts would have motivated you to read the book.

Thank you for your attention.

Innovation: The acmet Tools BU Experience

In my last post I mentioned the estimation funnel. The funnel is caused by the non-routine nature of any innovation initiative. Any software work, which is non-routine for the organization, is subject to the estimation funnel (see slide 2 of this document). It is an innovation initiative.

At acmet's tools BU, for the maintenance work that we did on our compilers, we could, with a fair degree of accuracy, estimate and commit to targets. These were routine. We did, on the other hand, construct a dsp compiler, an assembler, a linker, an elf to IEEE695 format converter, an assembly to assembly converter. These were innovation initiatives for us.

Govindarajan & Trimble list 10 principles to formalize experiments. One of them is: Find ways to spend a little, learn a lot. They characterize unknowns along two axes - consequence of being wrong, extent of ignorance. The ones with the most serious consequences and with the highest degree of ignorance are the ones that are most critical. These should be resolved first. That is precisely what protyping and incremental development is about. The authors give the example of how IBM used prototyping to for the development of the Blue Gene supercomputer.

Tools BU Experience
Initially, we made commitments to the customer that we failed to keep. We learned. We learned to develop incrementally. We learned to prototype. We learned to do the learning as an in-house project and not subject ourselves to pressures caused by schedules based on pure guesswork. Of course in-house projects have a perception problem.

At the time acmet decided to close operations, the tools BU was working on porting the GCC to a VLIW DSP. This was, for us, the most innovative. And we did go about setting up experiments to resolve unknowns. The project had as its first target, a prototype that would generate code for an FIR routine. The target was to match the performance of hand coded assembly. Most importantly, though we had a prospective customer, I refused to commit to firm dates. I admitted that all I had were guesses, not estimates. At the time I did not know it, but what we were really engaged in was a rigorous learning process.

Innovation: Established Organizations & Startups - Learning Process

In my earlier post I mentioned that Govindarajan & Trimble describe a rigorous learning process.

The effect of a rigorous learning process is that estimates become progressively more accurate over time. They illustrate it with a diagram. The diagram is precisely what softwarewallahs call "The Estimation Funnel"! (See my post on Estimation).

Estimates are based on hypotheses about cause and effect; they are of the form if < action.> then &lt;result>. Hypotheses, as in the scientific method, must be tested by experimentation. Evaluation of results must be free of biases (the authors describe these biases). Adhering to the sceintific method is what makes the learning process rigorous.

The genesis of all startups too are a set of hypotheses. These concern pain points, market size, value provided, revenue streams, costs, ... All of that goes into the business plan. The business plan is a set of hypotheses about business reality. It is not business reality. The rigorous learning method is required to evolve the business plan to conform more closely to reality.

The authors provide a simple graphical tool for recording the hypotheses. They call it a "hypothesis of record". They illustrate it with an example of how Analog Devices actually put it to use.

Further, the acts of making the business/innovation plan and rigorous learning cover, in my opinion, the first three steps of the Shewhart PDCA cycle. Not surprising, as continuous quality improvement too is based on hypotheses.

Innovation: Established Companies & Start-ups - The Business Plan

In continuation of my earlier post.

Quote from Govindrajan & Tremble's book:
"Given the uncertainities involved, writing an innovation plan can feel like writing a work of fiction. The predictions in them are wild guesses. Indeed in many cases, those trying to sell the intiatiative have deliberately stretched the projections to make the return on investment look better".

That is pretty much applicable to business plans made by start-ups. So what is the value of a business/innovation plan? The authors say:
"The value of an innovation plan is that it serves as a benchmark for subsequent learning." (Emphasis is mine).

By learning, the authors do not mean some academic, ivory tower stuff. They define, what they call a "rigorous learning process". Start-ups too should adopt the same process. I shall talk about it in my next post.

Innovation: Established Organizations & Start-ups

Vijay Govindrajan & Chris Trimble's book on Innovation is about innovation at established companies. The book explains why established organizations find innovation difficult and offers them a prescription. Nevertheless, I think the book is essential reading for persons running start-ups and small companies. What follows, in this and a few subsequent posts are my take-aways from the book.

Innovation consists of two parts - the idea and then its implementation. Ideas are the easy part. It is in successfully implementing ideas that established companies falter. The reason is that established companies evolve for efficiency. The authors call them Performance Engines. Performance Engines value predictability, small variance, and meeting targets. Performance Engines have past data . Innovation implementation have no past data for making forecasts. The authors state bluntly, "The first rule of innovation is simple: Innovation and on-going operations are always and inevitably in conflict" (italics are the authors'). Therefore, the team responsible for implementing the innovation must be distinct from the Performance Engine.  "Each innovation initiative requires a team with a custom organizational model and a plan that is revised only through a rigorous learning process" (emphasis is mine). They name such a team as the Dedicated Team. It is good partnership between the Dedicated Team and the Performance Engine that leads to successful innovation by established companies.

The way I see it, all start-ups, and small companies, are Dedicated Teams without an associated Performace Engine. Thus, what the authors have to say about the Dedicated Team, apart from the relationship with a Performance Engine, is of value to start-ups. I will post on some of these in following posts

Innovation: Skunk Works

The problem with having hackers is that most are pretenders. As Paul Graham says, "This attitude is sometimes affected. Sometimes young programmers notice the eccentricities of eminent hackers and decide to adopt some of their own in order to seem smarter. The fake version is not merely annoying; the prickly attitude of these posers can actually slow the process of innovation."

So what do you do with the pretenders? Obviously they must be got rid of. Who best to do it than the real hackers. In a company that is no longer a startup that would be problematic. I think one solution is to have a something on the lines of Lockheed's legendary Skunk Works, where innovative, and highly successful, aircraft like the U-2, the SR-71, and the Stealth fighter were created.

Skunk works need to be separated from the normal, on going, revenue generating, business. It needs to be run with different policies and controls for personnel, finance and administration. Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years of Lockheed gives some idea of how a skunk works is run.

Problem for Small Software Companies
At acmet's Tools BU the GCC port was, in some ways, a skunk works operation.Some of the people on customer-billed projects regarded it as a glorfied on-bench tenure. Some of the people on the project - some time or the other - also felt that they were on-bench. This, I feel, would happen in most small software companies.  It is the job of the senior manager, responsible for the skunk work project, to counter such perceptions.

Clarification
Innovation does not mean invention. A number of people may have done it before, but if for us it is new, then we are being innovative. The innovation need not necessarily lie only in the product. It can lie in the process, or the services bundled with the product. The GCC port work had never been done by us before. It was going to be a new business model for us. For acmet's tools BU it was innovative.