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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Sometimes financial decisions that are seemingly rational on their face can precipitate mass exodus of your best engineers.

We Hired the CFO
Last week as a favor to a friend, I sat in on a board meeting of a fairly successful 3½  year-old startup. Given all that could go wrong in this economy, they were doing well. Their business had just crossed cash flow breakeven, had grown past 50 employees, just raised a substantive follow-on round of financing and had recently hired a Chief Financial Officer. It was an impressive performance.

Then the new CFO got up to give her presentation – all kind of expected; Sarbanes Oxley compliance, a new accounting system, beef up IT and security, Section 409A (valuation) compliance, etc. Then she dropped the other shoe.

“Do you know how much our company is spending on free sodas and snacks?”  And to answer her own question she presented the spreadsheet totaling it all up.

There were some experienced VC’s in the room and I was waiting for them to “educate” her about startup culture. But my jaw dropped when the board agreed that the “free stuff” had to go.

“We’re too big for that now” was the shared opinion. But we’ll sell them soda “cheap.”

Unintended Consequences
I had lived through this same conversation four times in my career, and each time it ended as an example of unintended consequences. No one on the board or the executive staff was trying to be stupid. But to save $10,000 or so, they unintentionally launched an exodus of their best engineers.

This company had grown from the founders, who hired an early team of superstars, many now managing their own teams. All these engineers were still heads-down, working their tails off, just as they had been doing since the first few months of the company. Too busy working, most were oblivious to the changes that success and growth had brought to the company.

The Elves Leave Middle Earth – Sodas Are No Longer Free
One day the engineering team was clustered in the snack room looking at the soda machine. The sign said, “Soda now 50 cents.” The uproar began. Engineers started complaining about the price of the soda. Someone noticed that instead of the informal reimbursement system for dinners when they were working late, there was now a formal expense report system. Some had already been irritated when “professional” managers had been hired over their teams with reportedly more stock than the early engineers had. Lots of email was exchanged about “how things were changing for the worse.” A few engineers went to the see the CEO.

But the damage had been done. The most talented and senior engineers looked up from their desks and noticed the company was no longer the one they loved. It had changed. And not in a way they were happy with.

The best engineers quietly put the word out that they were available, and in less than month the best and the brightest began to drift away.

What Happened?
Startups go through a metamorphosis as they become larger companies. They go from organizations built to learn, discover and iterate, to predominately one that can execute adroitly having found product/market fit.

Humans seem to be hard-wired for numbers of social relationships. These same numbers also define boundaries in growing an organization – get bigger than a certain size and you need a different management system. The military has recognized this for thousands of years as they built command and control hierarchies that matched these numbers.

Wake Up Call
The engineers focused on building product never noticed when the company had grown into something different than what they first joined.

The sodas were just the wake-up call.

As startups scale into a company, founders and the board need to realize that the most important transitions are not about systems, buildings or hardware. It’s about the company’s most valuable asset – its employees.

Great companies do this well.

Lessons Learned

• Be careful of unintended consequences when you grow
• Recognize the transition boundaries in company size
• Preserve and manage an Innovation Culture

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Thursday is Thanksgiving Day in the United States.  Families gather from across the country to spend time with each other and feast on a traditional turkey dinner.

Since our kids were little our Thanksgiving tradition was to head to Hawaii with friends and eat Thanksgiving dinner under the palm trees to the sound of the waves next to the warm ocean. (Imu turkey can’t be beat if you’re trying to exceed any rational amount of salt intake.) This year, with the kids grown, their choice was to fly up from Southern California and spend the holidays at our ranch.  My brother and sister in-law, niece and nephew are here, and we’re all going to spend Thanksgiving morning creating a new tradition –  an extended family scavenger hunt that will take us across the ranch trails. Hopefully we won’t run into any wildlife bigger than us (other than our assortment of rattlesnakes, rabbits, deer, bobcats, wild boar, and mountain lions). Our friends who run the state park surrounding our ranch will join all of us for Thanksgiving dinner.

So no post today on entrepreneurship, Secret History of Silicon Valley, Customer Development, Lean Startups, etc. Just a reflection on my family and hopes for our children.

A Few Thoughts for Thanksgiving

• On this day it’s hard not to be grateful and give thanks for the things that matter – family, friends, our health, and feel blessed for all the things that have come to us. It’s harder to remember that we have no perpetual rights to them, they aren’t our due, but they’re gifts.  We try our best to give back to our community and country and always wonder – is it enough?

• We’ve taken the kids to enough places in the world to realize the United States still remains a country of opportunity and hope. For all its flaws, America is still a beacon of liberty and justice. My parents were immigrants who came through Ellis Island with nothing but the clothes on their backs – but they believed in the American dream. They worked hard their entire lives so their children could have a better life. Each year I teach hundreds of students from around the world who come to America to pursue their version of this same dream.

• This year as American families face economic hardships, (one out of eight Californian’s are unemployed,) we remember that as a nation we are still a generous people, willing to share and give to others less fortunate then ourselves – both at home and abroad. I hope we managed to teach our children compassion and charity for others. And as they find their own way in life, they will continue to give back to others.

• I’m grateful to those who serve our country and remember that people sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf. I hope our children remember that freedom needs to be earned and that they too find their way to serve their country.

Happy Thanksgiving

Steve

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