Accept Waste
In new product development, in research, you WILL go down some dead ends. Accept it.
Similar Posts
SAS: The . Manual
I stole that name from Chris Hemedinger for “The Missing Manual” because I thought it was hilarious. If you don’t program in SAS much then you probably did not think immediately, “Oh, . is the symbol for missing numeric data, how funny.” In fact, you are probably more like my daughter, Maria Burns Ortiz, who…
SAS On-Demand – Nice statistics teaching tool, with graphics & possibly cookies
I’ve been working with SAS Enterprise Guide 6.1 with SAS On-Demand on Virtual Box and I can’t find much to complain about. It is slow, but since I’m usually doing 14 things at once, while I’m writing for a task to complete I can read an email, download a file or answer a phone call….
Whipping your data into shape with SAS : Day 2 Fixing Errors & Identifying Input Datasets
Last post, we happily uploaded our data, read it into SAS using a combination of SAS utilities and coding, decided all was lovely and used this code to concatenate the 4 datasets. DATA allplants ; set import1 – import4 ; IF you get an error at this point, what should you do? Let’s say you…
Free SAS on my iPad – better than a fishbowl screensaver
In a Dilbert cartoon, the pointy-haired boss tells Dilbert, We need to give our customers what they want. To which Dilbert replies What our customers want is better products for free. Upon reflection, Dilbert and the boss agree to give them a fish bowl screensaver It has been said before that SAS is just offering…
How to stop gaslighting women in tech
According to that source of all knowledge on the interwebz, Wikipedia, “Gaslighting is a form of psychological manipulation that seeks to sow seeds of doubt in a targeted individual or in members of a targeted group, making them question their own memory, perception, and sanity.” Have you ever had a brilliant, super-competent friend who doubted her…
It Beats Working Backward from the Semi-Colon
My niece, Samantha, should be far more trusting at her tender age. She was skeptical – skeptical, I say! – that I once worked at a job where I got so bored that I started coding my SAS statements backwards, typing a semi-colon first and then working backwards, say to PROC . Non-naive nieces aside, it…
Transcript
—
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.”