Startup: An Insider's Guide to Launching and Running a Business (24 page)

The purpose of this drill is to help you to exorcise your self-imposed limitations by sheer brute force. What I am looking for as you visualize this realistic scenario is the ah-hah epiphany when you feel, if just for a moment, a connection with this distant and challenging objective. The sensation is like water flowing out of a constrained and tight enclosure and reforming itself into a new and wider shape—reaching forward in time and space. I am willing to bet that prior to this moment you would have never considered that the range of possible futures included anything this distant and far-flung. Here is to flexing and exploring your potential field. Flex away!

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The Flail

When people get into a high-pressure situation when the stakes are high, they often get flustered and think that they don’t have any options. They will often get bombastic and try Hail Mary stunts that will almost certainly make any bad situation worse. I call this
the flail
, similar to when a child who gets frustrated enough will often just start crying and flailing their arms around. I also saw this frequently with adults when teaching Brazilian jiujitsu, which I did for 12 years. New and even intermediate students would get frustrated, and then go ape and forget everything they knew about strategy, what to do, and what not to do. This would result, as I said a moment ago, in a bad situation getting worse. Eventually, as they became more advanced, they would learn to keep their head on straight and focus on the basics when they got frustrated. That lesson was often hard-learned and only came about as the result of trusting their training.

At a recent industry conference, SXSW Interactive, I saw an example of the flail that was both embarrassing and unproductive. The frustrated CEO of a company was having a hard time connecting with his desired audience at the conference, so he hijacked part of a panel discussion by taking the microphone during Q&A and addressing the audience with a pitch for his business. I admired the guts it would have taken to do that, but the attendees thought this guy was disrespectful and out of line because he broke social rules. Not a good move.

Afterward, I had the opportunity to meet with the gentleman and give him very direct feedback on his stunt. The backstory for him was that he believed
he had a fantastic idea and a real value-add for the world but could not get any attention. He was getting desperate and needed to try something.

The flail arises from the desire to get big results from little input, and a loss in faith in our ability to positively affect our environment through planning and execution. The problem is that the flail can undo significant amounts of work (as in damaging your reputation or exhausting limited funds). When the urge to flail arises, I recommend buttoning down and focusing on basics. Get back to the little things that each incrementally make your business go. Pick the most important thing that is not yet done and do it. Then progress to the next thing and the next. Keep it simple and focus on the basics.

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The Bell Curve

It is true that nature behaves in both predictable ways and in chaotic ways. Among the chaos, there are both visible and invisible patterns. Patterns are sequences of events that express themselves in ways that can be predicted.

People and business are part of nature. Recognize that in business, as in nature, when you are looking at large sets of data (your target customers, your competitors, the individual transactions that contribute to your bottom line, etc.), they will have characteristics and behaviors that tend to fall into bell curve distribution patterns (see
Figure 6-6
). By this point in the book you have seen this pattern repeatedly—and for a reason. Nature expresses itself in this pattern across a wide array of circumstances. It is a metapattern of grand and wide scale, so by understanding this you gain insight into the behavior of systems as far-flung as consumer decision-making, project management, and water molecules evaporating out of a coffee cup. This is important stuff.

You can use this to your advantage if you have this image in mind when you project how your decisions will play out in the marketplace.

Figure 6-6.
The bell curve is a global metapattern that manifests itself throughout business and nature.

To explain this, let’s construct a
very
simple example. The archetypical make-something-and-sell-it business model of a pizza restaurant will help illustrate this. In designing a menu for our pizza restaurant, would you want to be
authentic
and write everything in Italian? It might be argued that people would probably understand enough. (Let’s say the restaurant is in a historically Italian neighborhood.) It could more reasonably be argued that among the whole population of customers, a few would understand perfectly, most people would understand some of it, and some people would be completely lost. This is where a bell curve can be used to help you out (
Figure 6-7
).

Figure 6-7.
Customer bell curve for understanding Italian

Knowing that this likely distribution exists, you would reasonably predict that the “No Understanding” group is going to be totally lost, and at least half of the “Some Understanding” group will be lost. This would result in a quick decision against the avant-garde styling of a foreign language approach to your menus, and a decision to go with English as the predominant choice.

I find myself doing this kind of mental analysis for nearly everything that has to do with large groups of my customers. Deciding how to design a web interface? This leads to questions like these: what populations of people will be seeing the web site and what will their purpose be? Bell curve. Choosing words for marketing and advertising? Bell curve. Where will I be advertising and what mode of thought will people be in when they see my message? Bell curve.

For the restaurant, you might ask yourself whether you should buy the more expensive chrome barstools or go with the cheaper ones. To make this decision, you have to answer some questions. How many people will notice? Of that group, how many will actually be influenced enough by that small but expensive detail to be pushed them over the edge from one-time customer to repeat customer? Bell curves can help you tease out that answer.

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A Change in Perspective

As an entrepreneur, you make it a point to look at and study your business and the market every day. Every day you feel you are the same you, and the business is the same business. Both of these statements are false—both you and your business are different from day to day and moment to moment. When you spend time thinking about what you are doing and what you should be doing, don’t get stuck in a mental rut. Make it a habit to change your perspective on a regular basis. Here are a couple of my favorite ways for getting a new perspective on anything that I am thinking about.

Chunking Up

Expand your perspective. Look at your business from the 50,000-foot view and see how it looks. If you are absorbed in the day-to-day issues of running the business, you may not be in the habit of doing this.

If we were talking about chunking up with regard to a sailing ship, it would be taking your perspective up and away from sea level and looking at it from airplane level. How is it different from up here? For one thing, you see less of your ship and more of the environment that it is in. What if you moved up to a satellite-eye view from space? Even more so, you switch from object (the boat) to context (the environment and its patterns). Chunking up even more, you look at the effect of the moon on tides and how much light at night you have to sail by. Chunking up even more, you’re looking at solar flares affecting your communications. Chunking up further, what can we imagine?

Mental exercises like this can yield new and interesting perspectives that you will never have if you confine yourself to your usual ground-level perspective.

Chunking Down

The geometric counterpoint to chunking up—chunking down—provides yet another set of real, relevant, and potentially useful insights.

To continue the sailboat analogy, chunking down would be looking at how barnacles clinging to your hull increase friction and drag, causing you to travel
with slightly less velocity. Chunking down might have you analyzing the speed at which the crew can execute a tack to starboard or how positioning of the cargo in the hold affects your ability to handle high waves. The chunking-down methodology is critical for achieving operational excellence. From a business perspective, it is the process of deconstructing all of the details of how you touch your customers and optimizing all of the little pieces that matter—and judiciously leaving the pieces that don’t matter undisturbed.

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Systems Thinking

Let’s take a moment to think about thinking. The Greeks taught us about
linear thinking
, in which logic and sequential analysis are used to come to conclusions about the world around us.

Here’s an example of linear thinking: “Customers like coupons. If I put a coupon in the newspaper, I will get more business.”

This is a valid logical structure—the kind of structure that we use hundreds (if not thousands) of times a day to make decisions. Having applied a label to this method of thinking, I would like to introduce you to an alternative way of using your brain, called
systems thinking
. Systems thinking is a way to think of many things at once (a system of interconnected processes) instead of one thing at a time (linear). Systems thinking will allow you to visualize your business in multiple dimensions, to feel the ebb and flow of the inputs and outputs, to feel the sense of timing and balance within it, and to effortlessly access the rich field of information and potentials that exist outside of the standard linear-thinking mindset.

Here’s an example of systems thinking: “Customers like coupons. If we run a coupon in the paper … I can feel a number of aspects of our business that change at once … the ad spend … branding effect of the reach of the ad (depending on the approach) … distraction of marketing team from core business … customer expectation of getting discounts may hurt us since we don’t usually do coupons” (and 100 other things, all felt and wordless).

As an illustration of the process of visualizing your business from the inside—a systems-thinking approach—let us take a brief trip down the road together and think about driving. The next time you drive your car, notice how you are
processing the experience. It will likely feel like the following common-sense statement: “I am sitting in my car and driving down the road.” But there is more for you here …

Try this the next time that you are driving: feel the steering wheel in your hands. There is vibration from the road coming up through the frame of the car to your seat. Can you feel it? Feel the texture of the road beneath the tires. It is interesting how the smoothness of the road is punctuated by minor variations in the concrete.

Allow your awareness to expand beyond your body and take in the whole length and width of the car. As you change lanes, accelerate, and decelerate, allow yourself to sense the car as you would your body. You can feel the whole car moving. As you drive, relax into the experience of the car as your body. This is very comfortable, and you are more in control and more aware of the driving environment than you were before.

As you travel, you are seeing that the road ahead begins to turn gently. You are allowing your awareness to expand forward ahead of the car and feel the curve in the road. When you finally get to the curve you are already pulling in unison with the change in direction.

There are cars and trucks on the road as well. You can feel them, too. Without words, you change lanes to avoid a slower truck ahead of you. Your awareness takes it in, and you automatically feel how its change in position and speed affect you.