Steve Blank

My two daughters are now in college and have put their toes in the working-world with summer jobs. As they’ve grown older, they’ve heard their parent’s advice about women in the workforce.

This post is not advice nor is it a recommendation of what you should do. It’s simply my interpretation of what I observed watching my daughters grow up. Our circumstances were unique, times have changed, and your conclusions and opinions will most certainly differ.

Gender Differences
Growing up in the 60’s and 70’s when women were struggling against inequality in jobs, pay, etc., my wife and I came into parenthood with an unconscious bias that gender differences were mostly cultural. So how we raised our kids was an unintended science experiment.

When our two girls were toddlers, my wife started dressing them in overalls, and consciously bought them trucks and “boy toys” to play with along with dolls. We were both surprised and bemused to see them ignore the trucks and cars and prefer to play house. A bit later, our biggest eye-opener was when our younger daughter started asking for the “pretty pink dresses” instead of the overalls. (Given they didn’t watch TV, we ruled that out as a major role in their choices.) We started to believe that perhaps there was some hard-wiring about gender.

Boys With Sticks
As our kids reached grade school, the next lesson was watching them at play. I remember hiking with my girls and two 8-year old boys. When we stopped for lunch, the boys found sticks and immediately began a sword fight. When they tired of that, the boys chased each other and wrestled until they were exhausted. The girls, finding their pile of sticks, began building something together and telling each other stories. The suggestion of “why don’t you guys try each others games?” was met with utter 8-year old disdain. I realized I was looking at something – competition versus collaboration – that also seemed hard-wired. (Competition versus collaboration is my shorthand for a much longer set of gender-linked behaviors.)

Boys Rules, Girls Lose
When I entered the business world, I quickly found that office politics was just an older version of boys with sticks. The testosterone level was higher, and the game was more like musical-chairs with winners and losers until there was a single person on top. As a guy I didn’t need a rulebook to understand the game; there was a hierarchy, it was competitive, I win you lose.

It took me awhile but I realized that implicitly that advancement in corporations was unconsciously constructed around how men interact with each other. And unless they consciously work at it, most companies are not set up for collaboration.

As I grew older I realized that women in the workplace around me were having a harder time than the guys. They’d all come from college equally ambitious, but only after a few years, something different was happening to their careers.

Over time, I observed women who succeeded in the business world (as defined by their interest in moving up the hierarchy) headed in one of four career directions:

1. They chose departments within corporations where collaboration was an asset like Public Relations, HR, customer service, etc.
2. They set up their own companies to provide services and ran their own companies collaboratively.
3. They opted out of the workplace and raised a family, returning later.
4. They figured out the “boys rules” and followed them (having to work harder and smarter to prove that they were.)

Understand There Are Rules – And They’re Not Yours
When my girls started to play soccer, I used to remind them, “Make sure the people on the field aren’t carrying sticks because if they’re playing field hockey while you’re playing soccer, you’re going to get hurt.” As they got older, they understood I wasn’t only talking about sports but that I was trying to teach them how to figure out the rules of any game they were about to play.  And that included the workplace.

My advice to our daughters about women in the workplace has been pretty simple:

• The language of business is about winners and losers. Bosses who read Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War” as a guide to business strategy or “Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun” are unlikely to create a culture of collaboration.
• There are implicit rules of competition and collaboration in companies.  It’s not that anyone is hiding a secret rulebook; it’s just that no one has articulated the rules.
• In most companies men set these rules. Again, nothing secret here, but men don’t realize that they behave and think differently. They don’t have to explain the rules to other men so it never occurs to them to explain the rules to women.
• As women, they will be expected to perform to boys rules as defined in their workplace: This means they need to spend the time understanding what the rules are in their company and industry. If they don’t, they will find others less competent but more adept at playing the game getting promoted instead of them.
• Women can be equally competitive if they desire. It’s not a question of competency. Or a skill only boys have. If they want to succeed by competing they can. They just have to learn the rules and practice them.
• Find mentors then become one. In every organization or industry there’s someone who’s figured out the rules. Seek them out and know what they know. By the time you do, it’s your turn to mentor someone else.
• Collaboration can make you a stronger competitor. The irony is that organizations which collaborate are more effective competitors. When they reach a position of authority, use their instincts to build a fearsome organization/company.
• If they prefer to collaborate and don’t want to play by boy’s rules, they need to understand what their career choices are. There are plenty of other ways to be a productive member of society other than a position on a corporate org chart.
• Understanding the rules and career options doesn’t mean the rules are right or they have to accept them as the only career choices.  They can make change happen if they so desire. But they need to understand the personal costs of doing so.
• Some find the idea of gender differences uncomfortable. Having fought to have men and women be treated equally, discovering that there may be gender specific hard-wiring for behavior sets up cognitive dissonance. Some simply won’t accept that there are workplace gender differences.
• I may be wrong. Perhaps I misunderstood what I’ve seen or that time has changed the workplace significantly. Take this advice as a working hypothesis and see if it matches your experience.

Time will tell whether we gave our daughters good advice.

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One of the hardest problems for engineers in founding roles in a startup is interacting with customers up close and personal. Over the years I’ve found the best way to learn to do this is by emulating empathy.

The Problem
I was having dinner in Palo Alto with some of my Stanford engineering students and one of the subjects they were most interested in talking about was “how do you really get out of the building and talk to customers.”  Listening to them reminded me how terribly painful it had been for me.

Data Driven
I was always curious about technology and how things worked, but early in my career, this curiosity didn’t extend to people. I was more comfortable with data.

In my first company, ESL, I sat in secure locations and taught complex intelligence gathering systems to a classroom of maintenance and/or operations students. I was essentially responsible for imparting a fire hose of technical information efficiently. At my next company, Zilog, it was the same – I taught microprocessor system design to engineers. It was all about the efficient transfer of knowledge. High bandwidth, low noise.

But later at Zilog I moved into marketing. While I learned how to write data sheets, product marketing at Zilog was very little “listen to customers” and much more “talk at customers.”  It wasn’t until my next company, Convergent Technologies, that I began to understand the value of customer interaction.  As a product marketing manager, I traveled to customers at the behest of our sales people to impart the latest technical wisdom from the factory. Traveling with these salesmen was eye opening – they were comfortable having conversations with strangers and knew how to build rapport, relationships and trust. These guys explained to me that most people were happy to talk about themselves. My job was just to get the conversation started. Our products improved as our salesmen made customers comfortable enough to share their needs and issues. (As I would find out, every one of these salesmen had been design engineers in their past.  Yet most of the time, they artfully hid how much they knew.)

Emulation
I began to understand that while my brain was wired to dive into technical minutia and exchange product information at high speed, this wasn’t what most potential customers (and most people who had a modicum of social skills) wanted to do. In fact, unbelievably (to me) most people would trade valuable time in a meeting for social niceties.

Although these social cues were something that still didn’t come naturally to me, I concluded that to get much further in my career, I was going to have to have to learn. Over time, I watched how the best sales people did it and emulated their behavior. I learned how to smile, shake hands, make eye contact rather than stare at my shoes, talk about sports, ask customers about their jobs, their families, etc. and evidence apparent interest in people I didn’t know way before we got to chat about products. I’d even go out to lunch or dinner and manage to hold a conversation. The two hardest things to learn were: how to speak in front of a group and to make “cold calls” by myself. (Every once in awhile I’d run into a customer wired like me who’d say, “Can we cut the chatter and get down to business?” I’d laugh, and we’d do a high-speed data transfer.)

Surprisingly, I learned that listening to customers and others made me more creative. My best ideas started coming from brainstorming with others, something just not possible when communication was a one-way street.

Fast forward a few companies – MIPS and Ardent – I was still learning (at times painfully) to appreciate that facts were outside the building and not between my ears. After a decade in Silicon Valley, I had finally learned to emulate empathy.

Emulating Empathy
By the time I got to SuperMac, the transformation had taken hold. It was here that I began to teach others what I had learned.

I had inherited a manager of technical marketing, much smarter than me but with zero instinct or feel for customers. He was completely data driven, and our sales department wanted him nowhere near customers. I felt like I had just met my doppelganger from ten years ago. We established that his world view was not shared by most customers. And he understood that if he wanted a bigger role in marketing, he was going to have to change. So I ran the first of what would be many “how to emulate empathy” classes.

I described how getting closer to customers was at first going to be a cerebral rather than gut activity. With no instinct to guide him, he would have to consciously precompute what kind of response each situation called for and play them back when appropriate. He was going to have to sign up for public speaking classes. He was going to go on the road with our sales people, but this time he was going to have to watch what they do and start to copy them. I found him a mentor in a salesman who appreciated his technical skill and was willing to let him tag along.

As expected, the first couple of months was tough – on him, sales and customers. We’d debrief after many of his road trips and calls and course correct as necessary.  (At times I’d feel like I was talking to some earlier version of myself.) But by the end of the year, he had learned enough that the VP of Sales asked whether he could move permanently into a presales support role.

Repeatability
Over the next ten years in startups, I repeated this process with others. Today I remind my engineering students that empathy, while seemingly a foreign language, is possible to learn.

As for me, what I had emulated became second nature. Most of the time I can’t tell which mode is running.

Lessons Learned

Customer metrics are not the same as customer interaction.

Customer interaction is necessary for startup founders.

For some it is extremely difficult.

If it’s not instinctual customer empathy is a skill that can be taught and learned.

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Entrepreneurs and the early startup team all need to be motivated by a shared vision, passion and desire to build a large company.  Yet it’s the company legends that live on.

Fund Raising
Our little startup was less than a year-old.  We had been busy assembling our team and had just hired the last member of our exec staff.  We had also just closed our Series B financing with a major overseas partner.  The financing felt like a real validation of our strategy. In truth, it was only proof that our reality distortion field worked in Asia as well.

My Wife Thinks I Deserve a Bonus
One of the new hires was Bob, my VP of Business Development.  He knew so little about technology that I used to say he needed a manual to operate a light switch, but I hired him because a small voice said, “He’ll do extraordinary things.”

He did.  And still does.

Bob, among other things ran the fundraising for us in Asia and worked with an outside firm that had great connections in Japan to drag us around Tokyo and get the deal closed.  As in raising $10Million dollars kind of closed.

Everyone at our startup was working on startup starvation salaries, and Bob had taken a large pay cut to join us. When the Japanese partner deal was done, Bob said,  “Steve, I deserve at least a $10,000 bonus.  I haven’t been home in weeks, and I pulled off a financing even you admit was unbelievable.”

I patiently explained that this type of miraculous event was the norm for startups. The engineers were pulling off miracles on a daily basis, we were all taking fumes for salaries, but our payoff will be when our stock is worth something.  Until then, tell your wife you’ll get $10,000 when hell freezes over. No bonuses in a startup. To his credit Bob said while he understood, he was going to hear about it at home for not being appreciated.

Dinner
Since our management team hadn’t met each others’ spouses, I thought the financing would be a great reason to get everyone together for a low key celebratory dinner.  We picked a restaurant in Palo Alto down the street from the company and got a private room.

We drank lots of wine, had a nice dinner and after the dinner plates had been cleared I made a speech about teamwork, startup, passion, commitment, blah, blah.

I then congratulated the outside firm that Bob had used in Japan. I had invited their CEO and his wife and handed him a check for their retainer bonus for their help in the deal. Bob kept glancing at his wife who was giving him frosty looks and was very clearly not happy.

The New Briefcase
I then announced that it was unfair that Bob shouldn’t go unrecognized for his hard work so I had an award for him as well. The atmosphere around Bob’s wife began to thaw.  I said, “Bob had carried the same old beat up leather briefcase he had since law school and I knew he wouldn’t trade it for anything but I think its time he had something more professional looking.  So Bob, on behalf of the company, we bought you a new briefcase.”

The look on both Bob’s face and his wife’s went from happy to disbelief, to “I can’t believe you’re working for this idiot” on his wife’s face to “I can’t believe I work for this idiot” on Bob’s face.

I said, “Your new briefcase is under the table by your feet.  Why don’t you just put it on the table.”  Bob rooted around a bit and found the briefcase and put it on the table. It was the ugliest and cheapest briefcase you will ever see.

Everyone was now looking slightly embarrassed, all thinking that perhaps they had the most obtuse CEO in Silicon Valley. I thought Bob’s wife was going to throw a steak knife across the table.  I made another speech about how great Bob was and then sat down and said, “Lets get the waiter for coffee and desert.”

The ugly briefcase with its implicit statement sat on the table virtually steaming.

Legend
“Oh, one more thing,” I said.  “Bob, can you open up the briefcase and dump the papers on the table. We should clear out the stuffing so you can put your papers from your old briefcase in it.”

With almost an audible sigh, Bob unlatched the briefcase, held it upside down over the table and dumped out the contents.

In slow motion, dollar bills began to tumble out of the new briefcase.  And they kept coming out.  And they started making a pile of bills in front of Bob and his wife and the rest of the executive staff.

15,000 dollars in dollar bills.

Bob’s wife started crying.

I said, “Extraordinary work in a startup is the norm, but you performed even beyond my expectations. In my startups that’s worth recognizing.”

Rewards for extraordinary effort became part of the company’s legend.

Epilogue
Lest you think only salespeople are motivated by cash in a startup, over the life of the company we sprung the same surprise on engineers who did deliver the impossible. And at Christmas we gave out hundred dollar bills to each employee. While this small token of appreciation would have been dismissed if it had been a check, it had our engineers showing these bills to their friends in other companies.

In three or so years these cash incentives added up to no more than $50K. While everyone understood the theory that we were working to make the stock valuable (and we did,) the cash reminded them that we cared and noticed.

Lessons Learned

Cash has a much greater affect than a check.

Awards for critical contributions can make a lasting impact.

Small amounts spread through the company can be a great motivator.

Done correctly it turns incentives into legends.

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