A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read allIf the Shoe Fits posts here.
Winning takes many forms, as Ryan pointed out yesterday.
Let’s face it, we are not all going to be the next Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos.
But there seems to be plenty of room for us all to push a bit harder each day and surround ourselves with winners.
It is up to us to make that happen.
Not all winners desire to be founders anymore than all founders are winners.
I doubt anyone would/could/should minimize the abilities, skills, intelligence, and sheer grit that lands a person in a top senior role at a multibillion dollar tech company, such as Microsoft.
Achieving positions at that level are neither accidental nor serendipitous.
Now, imagine a future in which you are a winner of whatever kind and writing the summary paragraph of your LinkedIn profile.
What would you say when summing up what you did and how you accomplished it? What would you consider your major accomplishments?
Would it read anything like this? (Emphasis mine.)
“I am passionate about building technology that gets out of the way so you can focus on what matters most. My mantra ‘people first, technology second’ has been the driving force in my career. My focus has been leading teams and incubating new technologies and experiences to re-imagine the platform for intelligent work. In my career, I’ve helped build products, including Office, Windows, Internet Explorer, Xbox and Surface, that touch more than a billion people every day. As a leader, it’s important that my door always be open — to embrace everyone’s individual perspective, personality, style and abilities to makes my teams stronger — and creating a culture that the best ideas can come from anyone and anywhere.”
Is this someone worth emulating? Someone you’d want to hire?
Would your answer change when you learned this someone is a woman?
Over the years, founders have asked my for my opinion and ideas on naming their company and/or product.
They ask, but they rarely listen.
Especially if they already have an idea — which they are usually in love with.
They aren’t looking for ideas, let alone an opinion that differs from what they already think.
They are looking for agreement and validation.
Of course, I’m not an expert and don’t present myself as such.
That said, common sense and past flubs say that product names need to be relevant — to the product, the market and especially to the target country/language/culture.
Additionally, they need to be easy to remember and spell — particularly “created” words.
Lean methodology recommends MVPs for market validation and the same should apply to naming.
Proof of the importance of listening to market input is demonstrated by CB Insights’ CEO/Co-Founder Anand Sanwal, who recently told the story not only of how the company got its name, but also its logo.
When we started the company, we called ourselves ChubbyBrain. We were always focused on private company data but we were trying to be hip and startup’y (or that is what we’d like to believe)
Anand says their wake-up call came from a potential client.
We love the product and the data and what you guys are doing. But we can’t buy a product called ChubbyBrain.
Wow. Talk about wake-up call; more like revelry played five inches from your ear.
I find obituaries fascinating and inevitably learn a great deal reading them.
Although not familiar with Eiji Toyoda, a member of Toyota Motor’s founding family and an architect of its “lean manufacturing,” who died recently at age 100, I am familiar with his results.
In addition to lean manufacturing, he championed the idea for the Prius and, most importantly, the concept of kaizen.
Kaizen is the philosophy that underlies Toyoda’s culture and is responsible for its amazing decades-long growth and success.
…“kaizen,” a commitment to continuous improvements suggested by the workers themselves, and just-in-time production, a tireless effort to eliminate waste. Those ideas became a core part of what came to be called the Toyota Production System and a corporate ethos known as the Toyota Way.
I’ve heard the concept discussed by hundreds of managers over the years and heard many say that it didn’t work when they or their company tried it.
Kaizen reaps only modest success or fails outright in many companies for the same reason that consultants are hired.
Much of American management prefers its solutions and improvements in the form of slickly designed reports and impressive PowerPoint presentations from outside the company and that attitude seems to increase with rank.
Unlike Toyoda and its ilk, where, sans monetary rewards or stock options, workers strive to improve both products and processes.
“One of the features of the Japanese workers is that they use their brains as well as their hands,” Eiji Toyoda said in an interview with the author Masaaki Imai for the 1986 book “Kaizen.” “Our workers provide 1.5 million suggestions a year, and 95 percent of them are put to practical use. There is an almost tangible concern for improvement in the air at Toyota.”
Too often, when US companies invite suggestions from throughout their ranks, they implement only a small number of them and those usually come from “recognized” stars.
That approach/attitude does, however, create jobs by giving rise to an entire industry of high-earning consultants dedicated to teaching management how to “increase employee engagement.”
I wonder if one of the slides is about listening to everyone and then using the ideas.
We all know that things are not always as they seem and people certainly aren’t.
Brilliant ideas can come from any individual and are not dependent on their level or even their expertise.
By the same token, investors that sound great may not be, while those who are off-putting could be your salvation.
There are no hard and fast rules for evaluating whether what you see is what you’ll get, because each case is different—but that doesn’t matter.
The important thing to remember is that most stuff and people come with multiple layers and they may not be what they seem.
So while I can’t offer a multipurpose evaluation tool I can provide you with an unforgettable visual to remind you to look past the obvious.
SUBMIT YOUR STORY
Be the Thursday feature – Entrepreneurs: [your company name]
Share the story of your startup today.
Send it along with your contact information and I’ll be in touch.
Questions? Email or call me at 360.335.8054 Pacific time.
Technology quotes were really fun; I found a lot more than I can use today, so you can expect more on the subject on some Sunday in the future.
Let’s start with an overview from Arthur C. Clarke, who said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Ain’t that the truth.
Al Boliska brings up a good point, too, “Do you realize if it weren’t for Edison we’d be watching TV by candlelight?” But I think his tongue is firmly in his cheek.
Business loves to claim that progress is always positive, but John F. Kennedy had a different idea, “I am sorry to say that there is too much point to the wisecrack that life is extinct on other planets because their scientists were more advanced than ours.”
Our scientists are working on it as Alfred North Whitehead reminds us, “Ideas won’t keep; something must be done about them.” However, even when something is done they may still stink like rotten fish.
More than 50 years before the Internet Gertrude Stein said, “Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.” That certainly explains a lot of actions since, doesn’t it?
Finally, I offer you the (possible) wisdom of Georges Pompidou, “There are three roads to ruin; women, gambling and technicians. The most pleasant is with women, the quickest is with gambling, but the surest is with technicians.” Now that’s something to share with your development or IT department.
Tons of downer news these days and many managers have faced/are facing the trauma of laying off members of the team that they’ve worked so hard to build, so I thought some upbeat advice/information and stories to help you do your job better managing would lighten your weekend.
Business Week was kind enough to offer up a trove of stuff worth reading.
Some of the smartest ideas came from readers such as Autumn Parrott at Frist Center for the Visual Arts.
“We had a 25% budget cut. To help people understand the budgeting process, we formed a committee comprising only people who are not senior managers. It started conversations between departments and created a greater understanding of how our money is spent. People serve for a year. Each department gives recommendations like ‘we’re spending $70,000 a year on cleaning, so now everyone should clean their own offices and only use a cleaner once a week.’ One benefit of bringing in a variety of people is you don’t come up with the same ideas over and over again.”
This is a real winner. Sharing financial information below executive level is anathema to most bosses, but doing so increases employees’ sense of ownership which usually unleashes a barrage of cost-saving ideas.
There’s a great piece on trickle-up innovation where low-cost products developed for emerging countries are being tweaked for sale to affluent ones—the opposite of typical development.
There’s a lot more, but one in particular I’d like your opinion about before I say anything.
Entrepreneurs face difficulties that are hard for most people to imagine, let alone understand. You can find anonymous help and connections that do understand at 7 cups of tea.
Crises never end.
$10 really does make a difference and you’ll never miss it,
Winning takes many forms, as Ryan pointed out yesterday.
Although not familiar with 
Technology quotes were really fun; I found a lot more than I can use today, so you can expect more on the subject on some Sunday in the future.
Tons of downer news these days and many managers have faced/are facing the trauma of laying off members of the team that they’ve worked so hard to build, so I thought some upbeat advice/information and stories to help you do your job better managing would lighten your weekend.
