Focus: Broad & Narrow

A few posts ago I commented on focus. Seth Godin calls it a The Simple Two Step Process.

Business & the Principles of War

The British armed forces (and thus the Indian armed forces) have 10 Principles of War. I learned it by the acronym COSSAC FAME. These are equally applicable to business strategy & tactics.

1. Concentration. Determine the chinks in the competitions offerings, needs that are not being addressed, segments that are not being served, ... Then concentrate on exploiting these weaknesses
2. Offensive Action. Be proactive. Do not wait for the customer to walk in the door. Go out and find her. Do not wait for the competition to obsolete your product. Obsolete it yourself. Actively seek innovation. Follow the golden rule, "Do onto others as they would do onto you; only do it first." When on the defensive, counter-attack to slow down the competition.
3. Security. Temper offensive action with measures to safeguard against exposing your own vulnerability.
4. Surprise. Innovate. Then execute with speed. Slow execution will alert the competition.
5. Administration. Meeting regulatory & legal requirements. Managing cash flows. Safe and hygienic working conditions ... Things that will not give you a competitive edge but must be done if you are to stay in the game. What Dealing with Darwin: How Great Companies Innovate at Every Phase of Their Evolution calls context
6. Co-operation. Between different function heads. They should not be working at cross purposes, or playing political games.
7. Flexibility. No plan survives contact with the enemy as expounded by von Moltke. Gen Eisenhower said, "Plans are worthless. Planning is essential." The actual scenario will not be quite the same as the one planned for. Business environments change, assumption turn out to be not quite true. If business plans are inflexible they will break.
8. Aim, Selection & Maintenance. There is a hierarchy of aims. At the very top is the Mission of the Business. This must be selected with due thought and then zealously maintained.
9. Morale. It is adversity that tests morale. What builds morale is not food courts, or week-end beer bashes, or company parties. Management must be frank and truthful on all company matters, must share the pain, must train people for tasks they are to handle and not set them up for failure. The CEO must take the lead. It calls for relentless and truthful communication through word and deed, and celebration of even small, individual, or team wins. Morale indicates the quality of leadership.
10. Economy of Effort. Get the maximum bang-for-buck. Be frugal - but effective.

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.

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: 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