Accept Waste
In new product development, in research, you WILL go down some dead ends. Accept it.
In new product development, in research, you WILL go down some dead ends. Accept it.
I read a blog post where the author said the women who dropped out of programming “should have been discouraged” because it’s not for everyone and many women try to use smiles and flattery to get men to do their work for them. I actually have had the experience the author cites, but with both…
In a few (okay, a lot) of my previous posts I talked about how you could get set up with SAS On-Demand, problems you might have, programs to run. Now we get to the crux of the matter. Why? Let’s assume that you are like most professors in America and your students are like most…
Today I am on my soapbox. These are words to the wise for working people everywhere, but especially to a certain generation – mine – and to a certain gender – women. If “getting the job done” requires that you work 70 hours a week while other people work 40, then the solution is that…
Esteemed statistics guru, Dr. Nathaniel Golden has some sobering news for Democrats. His latest models predict a Republican blow out. As can be seen by the map below, the Republican front-runner has tapped into the mood of resentment in the country’s non-elites. When the dust has settled, only the two highest earning states in the…
Upfront confession – I completely copied the first part of this from a macro Paul Dickman wrote in 1999 because it did ALMOST exactly what I wanted. I tested it several times with different data and on different computers to see that it worked the way I expected. I actually found it on some random…
With the new SAS On-Demand for Academics, I presume there will be a lot of professors who have a teaching assistant, research assistant or intern preparing the data for examples for their classes. Or, you may be co-authoring a paper with one of your colleagues. Let’s suppose you are working on a SAS Enterprise Guide…
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.”