Going to Trade Shows Like it Matters – Part 2

Posted on May 22, 2009 by steve blank

I wrote this “Going to Trade Shows Like it Matters” memo as a board member after I saw our company at a trade show. Part 1 of this post offered some suggestions on going to trade shows to generate awareness. This post offers suggestions if you are going to a trade show to generate leads.

Ignore This Post
The same caveat applies as in the first post; If you’re selling via the web, and trade shows seem hopelessly anachronistic, ignore this post.  If you’re in markets that still exhibit at them (semiconductors, communications, enterprise software, etc.,) this may be a useful read.

————

To: Marketing Department
From: Steve
Subject: Going to Trade Shows Like it Matters

Generating Leads

Ownership
If your company is going to a show to generate leads, then sales owns the show.  Marketing is at the trade show as a support organization. Marketing may be physically “staging” the booth, and may even it “man it,” but don’t be confused, this is the VP of Sales party.  While one could argue that a trade show is just another demand creation activity akin to advertising or PR, trade shows are the closest eyeball-to-eyeball contact you’re company is going to have with customers, competitors and partners.

While the industry average says only 20% of show leads are followed up, that only happens in other companies, not yours.  Going to a show to get leads is a sales function, if the leads aren’t followed up marketing won’t be supporting these kinds of trade shows out of their budgets.  Period.  This is worthy of an open and honest discussion with sales up front.  Just as marketing needed sales agreement that it was worth going to shows to generate awareness, sales needs to commit to marketing that leads will be followed up.

The Goal
Remember your goal is to get qualified leads into the sales pipeline. You want to maximize the number of people who give you their contact information, and gather enough information so a sales person can prioritize who to call first.  This can’t happen unless you sit down with your sales team before the show and agree on who are the likely prospects.  What companies should they booth team be looking for?  What titles? Will there be a salesperson manning the booth so important prospects can talk to them immediately?

Promoting Your Presence
The best trade show planning will fail if nobody knows you’re there. Three-quarters of show attendees know what exhibits they want to see before they get to the show. Strong pre-show promotion will let your customers and prospects know about your exhibit. Are you twittering your appearance at the show?  Did you create a Facebook page for the show? Are you buying Google adwords and adsense for the show? Direct email or snail mail to the pre-registered attendees is essential.  Companies that don’t do this are the same ones who would have a party without sending out any invitations.

Many people arrive at a show with a schedule of what they want to see and have little or no time for other booths, so it’s important to get on that schedule. If sales is committed to the show, they will be contacting prospects and suspects reminding them you will be there.  And inviting to the booth/dinner/private demo. While marketing can help, if sales isn’t fully engaged in this activity it’s a bad sign. 

Follow-up as a Priority
While 80% of show leads aren’t followed up in other companies, it doesn’t happen in yours. Lead follow-up is your number one priority after a show, taking precedence over just about everything else — including catching up on what you missed while you were out of the office. Rank your leads by level of importance and interest, and base your post-show efforts on these priorities. Make sure that sales is emailing/ phoning/ texting the hottest prospects within a week after the show ends — the longer you let them sit, the staler they’ll become. 

Send everyone else who gave you a lead some kind of follow-up email/paper mailing. Your post-show email or mailing can be as simple as a thank-you note or a brochure with a cover note. Write it before you leave for the show, so you can send the mailing immediately upon our return. Send PDF versions of brochures and product sheets as soon as you get back to the office. Have enough dead-tree brochures and product sheets on hand before the show so you can snail-mail out the information after you emailed it. You’d be surprised how effective sending a paper followup to a PDF can be.

Measurement
We measure everything.  Particularly leads.  It’s pretty simple.  a) How many overall leads did you generate, b) how many leads ended up in the sales pipeline, and c) how many leads ever turned into an order.

To close the loop between leads and orders, always offer a sales commission bonus for orders that came from leads followed up from a show. It’s amazing how effective how a bonus can be. If leads from this show do not turn into orders, why are we going again next year?

General Comments for both Awareness and Lead Generation
Demo’s
I don’t care how small the booth or trade show is, do a canned demo every 20 to 30 minutes regardless of whether anyone is at your booth or not.  The demo repeats the one or two key messages you decided were most important. Assume everything you’re showing will be seen by every one of your competitors, so this is not the place for showing the “secret new release.”  You can do that in a private hotel suite for important prospects.  

Demo’s are the heart of the booth. Without one, you’ll be having your booth staff standing in the aisles mournfully waiting for someone to walk up to them.  Or worse, your salespeople will be talking to each other looking like they’re too busy to be interrupted.  In both cases, that means you’re broadcasting “nothing interesting is in this booth folks, keep walking.”  A continual demo lets you act like you have something important to share. Your sales people can gather the crowd, work the crowd and use their sales skills to see if prospects in the audience have interest.  The difference between booths offering a demo and those without one is striking.  One of them is a loser.  It isn’t going to be your booth.

Competitive Analysis
Unless you are at the wrong show your competitors will be there as well. Someone from your company has to be designated the official competitive intelligence officer for this show.  They are in charge of coordinating collection of competitive data, and preparing a summary report which contains facts as well as analysis. Get competitors literature, press packets from the press room, sit through their demos, and don’t come home until you know everything they’re saying. At the same time keep an eye out for competitors at your booth, (they may not be wearing their own company’s badges.) Welcome them loudly and openly. Put your arm around them and walk them around your booth. Make sure the staff is trained to never disparage a competitor. (Either at the show or anywhere else.)  

Partnership Opportunities
At any show you are attending there has to be tons of opportunity for business to business relationships you hadn’t thought about.  Everyone should have a chance to walk the floor looking for deals, technology, distribution, customers, etc. Someone from your company has to be designated the opportunity monitor, responsible for coordinating potential partner information and disseminating it in writing after the show.

No Literature at the Booth
Fancy brochures are expense, and most trade show literature ends up on the hotel room floor.  Have sample literature under Lucite and chained to the booth.  Take imprints of badges in exchange for paper literature requests.  Each imprint is now a lead.  (Keep a stash of literature for real live prospects under the table, but they should be pulling out their wallet to buy before you let go of it.)

Booth Staffing
You can’t do it alone. Even if it’s a small 10-foot booth you will need at least one person to “spot” you when you leave the booth to take a break or to check out the competition. For bigger booths a good rule of thumb is to have two to four staffers for every 100 square feet of exhibit space.

Even for the smallest trade show, no one shows up without booth training. (Messages, themes, demo’s. Everyone should be articulate and agile in describing and demoing the products.) And if you don’t show up for booth training, work somewhere else. (I’ve always visibly sent someone home from a tradeshow for missing training or booth duty.  It makes the point and becomes company lore.  You’ll never have to do it again.) Everyone should understand your goals, your messages, your demos and your theme and know their role. If your don’t have enough employees on the payroll, hire relatives, friends, or part-timers and train them.

Trade Show Post Mortem
Evaluate the experience.

  • Physical booth: What worked? What didn’t?
  • Demos/Equipment: What worked? What didn’t?
  • Messages/theme: What worked? What didn’t?
  • Staffing: What worked? What didn’t?

Write it down and keep it in a tradeshow handbook for those who will follow.

Filed under: Customer Development, Marketing | Tagged: , , , , | 7 Comments »

Going to Trade Shows Like it Matters – Part 1

Posted on May 21, 2009 by steve blank

Ignore This Post
If you’re selling via the web and trade shows are something your grandfather told you about, ignore this post.  If you’re in markets that still exhibit at them (semiconductors, communications, enterprise software, medical devices, etc.,) you know they’re expensive in time, dollars and resources.

I wrote this “Going to Trade Shows Like it Matters” memo as a board member after I saw our company at a trade show. My observation was that they had the “Going to Trade Shows” part down, they just needed to add the “Like it Matters.”

————

To: Marketing Department
From: Steve
Subject: Going to Trade Shows Like it Matters

 

Setting Clear Trade Show Objectives
There’s no use going to a show if you don’t know why.  Answers like, “because our competitors are there,” or “because it’s on our calendar,” or even “because I think we should,” don’t cut it.  (Remember your department has a mission.) There’s a plethora of reasons why a company would want to exhibit at a show:

  • write sales orders
  • generate leads for future sales
  • research the competition
  • spot trends
  • generate awareness and visibility within the industry
  • build our mailing list with quality names
  • find better or cheaper suppliers
  • build rapport with current customers
  • get press
  • generate excitement around a new product introduction
  • get additional partners
  • recruit staff

The problem with this list is that every company can find at least five things they like on it.   For a small company this is like throwing your tradeshow money on the floor.  A company must pick the one or two top goals or nothing useful will happen. The number one reason a small company is going to a tradeshow is to generate awareness.  As the company gets larger and a large professional sales organization kicks in, its second priority is to generate qualified leads. This doesn’t mean that there aren’t tertiary goals, but they are just that – not the top one or two.

Before you go to a trade show sales and marketing need to agree to measurable goals. Everything you do before, during, and after the show should be evaluated in terms of whether it contributes toward reaching these goals.  While marketing can decide they are going to the show to generate awareness, marketing can’t decide they are going to a show to generate leads – unless the VP of Sales says that they believe those leads will be valuable and sales has a plan to follow up on those leads.

If sales doesn’t think the show is worth going to for the leads, and marketing isn’t going to generate awareness, remind me – why are you going to this show?

Generating Awareness
Ownership
If your company is going to a show to a tradeshow to generate awareness, then marketing owns the show, and sales is there for support.  Do not assign any sales people to the show who feel they “have something better to do,” 1) they might actually do (like closing an order) and, 2) bad sales attitudes are contagious.

Budget
A test for whether a show is worth going to generate awareness, is to total up the show budget.  Then offer those budget dollars to the VP of Sales.  They have a choice; they can tell you not to go to this show and they can use your show budget for anything they want in sales; or they can let you go to the show to use those dollars to create awareness for them.  If the VP of Sales doesn’t think that generating end user awareness and ultimately demand for them is worthwhile, then one of you is an idiot.  Hope it’s not you.

Once you know which show you’re going to and what your goals are, draw up a budget. Without a budget, costs can quickly spiral out of control (last minute impulse purchases to jazz up your booth, for example) and defeat your best laid plans. A rule of thumb is that your space costs represent about a quarter of your total show budget. So when you know what you’ll be paying for space rental, multiply it by four, for a rough idea of your expenses.

The Message
Sitting around a conference room table brainstorming messages that might resonate with customers, or worse having a PR agency doing that for you, is a firing offense in a small company.  You should be brainstorming messages with current and potential customers.  Your messages should have been pre-tested with prospects and existing customers way before you go to a show.

Say it Loud
Attendees are looking at hundreds of booths each screaming messages at them.  Why are your messages going to stand out?  Show-goers can’t sort through a pile of inarticulate or barely whispered thoughts.  Pick just one or two key ideas that you want to get across at the show and train yourself and your staff to “stay on message”.  Then that message needs to be translated into a theme for the booth, the staff and the show.

Then shout the messages out (virtually) at the top of your lungs. Visually, demo’s, wild colors, etc.  If you think you are going to offend your customers or embarrass your engineering organization, get out of the marketing department.  IBM doesn’t have to shout to get noticed, but you do.  Design your graphics, pre-show promotion, literature and show directory advertising around your focused message and theme.  However, scantly clad women, children and animals (in any combination) are still in bad taste.

Promotions attract booth traffic
Promotions and give-away’s drive traffic to your booth. Offer a free bestselling book in your industry (can you have the author there to autograph it?); Hold a contest, (If you’re giving away a big prize make sure your most valuable prospect wins.) Have a loud product demo; give away pieces of candy; hire a masseuse and offer free back rubs. While the promotion needs to fit your company’s image and the demeanor of the attendees, I’ll tell you that I’d be giving away dating-service T-shirts at the bereaved widows’ convention.

Location, location, location
A small booth is no excuse for being stuck in the corner.  Don’t tell me “that’s where they put all the small booths.”  I know that, so why do I need you?  Get yourself into the booth selection meetings and get to know the manager.  Call often and early and try to upgrade your location.  Shoot for a high-traffic location.  Be sure to look at a floor plan before you choose your site. Foot traffic is heaviest in certain areas of a typical trade show floor. Look for locations near entrances, food concessions, rest rooms, seminar rooms, or close to major exhibitors. Try to avoid dead-end aisles, loading docks, obstructing columns, or other low-traffic regions.

Partners Booths
While your booth may be small, some of your potential or existing partners may have much larger ones, in much more visible locations. Figure out how to get your equipment into every other big booth we can. But it has to come with one of your people to talk about the product. If you tell me we can’t find any established exhibitor whose products or services complement ours to let us in, I question why you are going to this show.

Tradeshow Seminars
Almost all tradeshows have conferences and seminar sessions; is your company keynoting any?  Leading or speaking at any? No is the wrong answer.  If there aren’t any that match your company, create some.  You ought to know who the conference or seminar chairman is a year a head of time, and they certainly ought to know you.  I can’t imagine your company going to a tradeshow to create awareness and not being a speaker.  (That means neither can you.)

Preshow Publicity
Does your company have any new announcements to make at the show?  Are you twittering your appearance at the show?  Did you create a Facebook page for the show?  Are you buying Google adwords and adsense for the show?  Did you issue any press releases targeted at the trade publications and local papers that will be covering the show?  Has the company talked to key industry analysts/press pre-show to ask them to stop by?  Did the company send out direct mail (email or postcards) to potential or pre-registered attendees reminding them to stop by the booth? Do you have press kits for the show, (electronic and paper) and have you posted them on-line and dropped them by the physical and on-line press room?

Key Influencers
Does the company have press/industry analysts scheduled for demos?  Does the company have demos or dinners/lunch scheduled for key industry influencers?  Is the company hosting/co-sponsoring some event?  Why not?  

Customer Discovery
Sitting inside of your company you’ve made a whole bunch of assumptions about who your customers are and why they will buy.  Now there are thousands of real live customers walking around the show floor with facts.  You need to get those facts back inside our building.  What are all the questions you’ve ever had about customers?  What do they read?  What other shows do they go to?  How would they reach them?  Have they ever heard of you?  Do they believe your key messages?  Do they believe the problem you are solving is important?  Who would buy your product? 

Measurement
How do you measure success at a tradeshow where the goal was generating awareness?  Ask the potential customers who actually came to your booth and call them after the show.  Take all the leads you got at the show (yes you are collecting leads even though you’re at the show to generate awareness) and follow up.  Ask them what they thought of your company/product before/after the show.  What message did they take away?  Did this help them to understand your company/product

Part 2 of the memo, to be posted tomorrow: using a trade show to generate leads. Plus tips on overall trade show strategy.

Filed under: Customer Development, Marketing | Tagged: , , , , | 2 Comments »

Founders and dysfunctional families

Posted on May 18, 2009 by steve blank

Startup CEO Traits
I was having lunch with a friend who is a retired venture capitalist and we drifted into a discussion of the startups she funded. We agreed that all her founding CEOs seemed to have the same set of personality traits – tenacious, passionate, relentless, resilient, agile, and comfortable operating in chaos. I said, “well for me you’d have to add coming from a dysfunctional family.”  Her response was surprising, “Steve, almost all my CEO’s came from very tough childhoods.  It was one of the characteristics I specifically looked for. It’s why all of you operated so well in the unpredictable environment that all startups face.” 74HGZA3MZ6SV

I couldn’t figure out if I was more perturbed about how casual the comment was or how insightful it was.  What makes an individual a great startup founder (versus an employee) has been something I had been thinking about since I retired. My comfort in operating in chaos was something I first recognized when I was working in the Midwest.

The Rust Belt – (Skip this Section if I’m Boring You)
Out of the Air Force, my first job out of school was in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in the mid-1970’s installing broadband process control systems in automotive and manufacturing plants throughout the Midwest. I got to travel and see almost every type of Rust Belt factory – at the time, the heart and muscle of American manufacturing – GM, American Motors, Ford, U.S. Steel, Whirlpool.  Our equipment was installed in the manufacturing lines of these companies, and if it went down sometimes it brought the entire manufacturing line down.

I always made a habit of getting a tour of whatever manufacturing plant I was visiting. Most plant foremen were more than accommodating and flattered that someone actually was interested.  I was fascinated to learn how everyday objects (cars, washing machines, structural steel, etc.) that ended up on our shelves or driveways were assembled.

My favorite factory was the massive U.S. Steel plant by Lake Erie. On my first visit the foreman walked through this enormous building, not much more than a giant steel shed, where they had an open hearth furnace. We came in time to see the furnace being tapped, pouring steel out into giant buckets. (Years later I realized I watched the end of an era. The last open hearth furnaces closed in the 1980’s.)

We stood on a platform several stories up and light streamed diagonally through windows set high on top of the building cutting through the black soot particles created when the incandescent steel hit the bucket. It was too loud to talk so I just watched the steel pour through the clouds of soot backlit by the blinding bright liquid metal. It looked like an update of the iconic image of Penn Station writ large.

And as I stared through the billowing clouds of soot flashing between black and white took on fantastical shapes as tiny figures on the factory floor scurried around the bucket. I could have stayed there all day.

Automobile plants were equally fascinating. They were like being inside a pinball machine. At the Ford plant in Milpitas the plant foreman proudly took me down the line. I remember stopping at one station a little confused about its purpose. All the other stations on the assembly line had groups workers with power tools adding something to the car.

This station just had one guy with a 2×4 piece of lumber, a large rubber mallet and a folded blanket.  His spot was right after the station where they had dropped the hoods down on the cars, and had bolted them in. As I was watched, the next car rolled down the line, the station before attached the hood, and as the car approached this station, the worker took the 2×4, shoved it under one corner of the hood and put the blanket over the top of the hood and started pounding it with the rubber mallet while prying with the lumber.  “It’s our hood alignment station,” the plant manager said proudly.  These damn models weren’t designed right so we’re fixing them on the line.”

I had a queasy feeling that perhaps this wasn’t the way to solve the car quality problem.  Little did I know that I was watching the demise of the auto industry in front of my eyes.

Operating in Chaos
Repairing our equipment could be time critical. One day, I was at the Ford Wixom auto assembly plant training my replacement and I was at met at the door by an irate plant manager.  He welcomed us by screaming, “Do you know how much it costs every minute this line is down.” As I’m troubleshooting our equipment scattered across the plant, (in the computer room, above the steel, in NEMA cabinets next to line, etc.,) the manager followed us still yelling.  My understudy looked at me and said, “how can you deal with this chaos and still focus?”  And until that moment I had never thought about it before.  I realized that what others heard as chaos, I just shut out.

A Day in the Life of A Founder
For those of you who’ve never started a company, let me assure you that it never happens like the pleasant articles you read in business magazines or in case studies.  Founding a company is a sheer act of will and tenacity in the face of immense skepticism from everyone – investors, customers, friends, etc.  You literally have to take your vision of the opportunity and against all rational odds assemble financing, and a team to help you execute.  And that’s just to get started.

Next, you have to deal with the daily crisis of product development and acquiring early customers.  And here’s where life gets really interesting, as the reality of product development and customer input collide, the facts change so rapidly that the original well-thought-out business plan becomes irrelevant.

If you can’t manage chaos and uncertainty, if you can’t bias yourself for action and if you wait around for someone else to tell you what to do, then your investors and competitors will make your decisions for you and you will run out of money and your company will die.

Great founders live for these moments.

Creating the Entrepreneurial Personality – A Thought Experiment
Fast forward three decades back to today.  The lunch conversation was an interesting data point to add to a hypothesis I’ve had.

I’ve wondered, just as a thought experiment, how would we go about creating individuals who operate serenely in chaos, and have the skills we associate with one type of entrepreneurial founder/leader?

One possible path might be to raise children in an environment where parents are struggling in their own lives and they create an environment where fighting, abusive or drug/alcohol related behavior is the norm.

In this household nothing would be the same from day to day, the parents would constantly bombard their kids with dogmatic parenting, (harsh and inflexible discipline,) and they would control them by withholding love, praise, and attention. Finally we could make sure no child is allowed to express the “wrong” emotion. Children in these families would grow up thinking that this behavior is normal.

(If this seems unimaginably cruel to you, congratulations, you had a great set of parents.  On the other hand, if the description is making you uncomfortable remembering some of how you were raised – welcome to a fairly wide club.)

Over the last 5 years I’ve asked over 500 of my students how many of them grew up in a dysfunctional family (participation was voluntary.) I’ve been surprised at the data. In this admittedly very unscientific survey I’ve found that between a quarter and half of the students I consider “hard-core” entrepreneurs/founders (working passionately to found a company,) self-identified as coming from a less than benign upbringing.

Founders as Survivors
My hypothesis is that most children are emotionally damaged by this upbringing.  But a small percentage, whose brain chemistry and wiring is set for resilience, come out of this with a compulsive, relentless and tenacious drive to succeed.  They have learned to function in a permanent state of chaos.  And they have channeled all this into whatever activity they could find outside of their home – sports, business, or …entrepreneurship.

Therefore, I’ll posit one possible path for a startup founder – the dysfunctional family theory.

Throwing hand grenades in Your Own Company
One last thought. The dysfunctional family theory may explain why founders who excel in the chaotic early phases of a company throw organizational hand grenades into their own companies after they find a repeatable and scaleable business model and need to switch gears into execution.

The problem, I believe, is that repeatability represents the extreme discomfort zone of this class of entrepreneur. And I have seen entrepreneurs emotionally or organizationally try to create chaos — it’s too calm around here — and actually self-destruct.

So What?
Lets be clear, in no way am I suggesting that growing up in a dysfunctional family is the only path to becoming a founder of a startup.  Nor am I suggesting that everyone who does so turns out well. And in particular I’m not suggesting that every employee who joins a startup fits this profile, it just seems more prevalent in the founder(s).

And this hypothesis might be a good example of confusing cause and effect. Yet I am surprised given how much is written about the attributes of a startup founder, how little has been written about what “makes” a founder.

Let me know what you think.   Does any of this match your experience or people you know?

Comments and brickbats welcomed.

Filed under: Customer Development, Family/Career/Culture, Technology | Tagged: , , , , | 41 Comments »

Love/Hate Business Plan Competitions

Posted on May 7, 2009 by steve blank

I love business plan competitions.

I hate business plan competitions.

I Love Business Plan Competitions
I had a breakfast with a friend who has founded a few companies in Thailand and started the New Ventures Program at one of their universities. He was visiting Stanford and mentioned how proud he was that several of his Thai students were here in the States for a business plan competition. 74HGZA3MZ6SV

For those of you who don’t know, business plan competitions are held by universities who get their students to enter and compete to see who has the best business idea. Local venture investors and/or companies offer cash prizes for the winners.  In exchange, these VCs/companies get early looks at new deal flow and offer aspiring entrepreneurs feedback and advice on their business plan.

These competitions started in the early 1980‘s at the University of Texas and have sprouted like mushrooms in the last 10 years.  Just Google the term and you’ll be amazed.  Almost every university, region and car wash now has a business plan competition; the rules, who can participate, how large the prizes and who are the judges vary by school.

Over scrambled eggs and diet coke, I listened to this seasoned startup veteran describe the excitement of his students who came to the U.S. to compete. I finally understood how valuable these contests can be for students in cities or countries without a venture capital or entrepreneurial infrastructure.  At a university business plan competition, for the first time they can swim in the sea of expertise that we/I take for granted in the middle of Silicon Valley.  Win, lose or draw, these students have a life changing experience where they can network and get smarter as they see what good startup thinking looks like.

I love business plan competitions (and with my valley-centric bias, I think Berkeley and Stanford have two of the best.) If you are outside of Silicon Valley, you ought to jump into them with both feet.  You’ll learn a lot.

I Hate Business Plan Competitions
Yet this same conversation reminded me why every time students at Berkeley or Stanford tell me they’ve entered a technology business plan competition, I question whether they are wasting their time.

For all the reasons why business plan competitions are wonderful for students from outside the U.S., or even outside of Silicon Valley, I am left speechless when a student in a 50-mile radius of Sand Hill Road (who tells me they’re serious about starting a company) thinks their time is better spent entering one.

I have seen students spend well over a year refining a business plan competition pitch when they have could have gotten the same advice within a month by literally stepping out the door and aggressively pursuing it.  And with the other 11 months, they could have been well into actually building a company.

In the real world, most business plans don’t survive the first few months of customer contact.

And even if they did – customers don’t ask to see your business plan.

Here’s a simple heuristic: if you are one of the lucky few who are within one- or two-degrees of separation of venture capital and startup resources (law firms, patent attorneys, etc.) and you are chasing a technical business plan competition, you are signaling that you really don’t want to start a company.  (And that may be fine with you. Just don’t confuse the time you’re spending with actual progress in building a company.)

I hate business plan competitions – when they encourage students to write a “winning plan” rather than teaching them how to get out of the building and use locally available resources to start a company.

Filed under: Marketing, Technology, Venture Capital | Tagged: , , , , | 17 Comments »

The Sharp End of the Stick

Posted on May 4, 2009 by steve blank

The Sharp End of the Stick
At some point in my career as I began to formulate thoughts about mission and intent, I started to think about the broader role of marketing in a growing technology company. It became clear to me that the mission of marketing in most companies has to be to support sales.  While this may seem obvious to anyone not in sales and marketing, trust me, in a technology company this is a conceptual breakthrough. In my experience, every marketer with an MBA wants to “do strategy.” Every marketing communication hire couldn’t wait to produce the next great ad or PR program.  Every product marketer thought they should help define the product feature set, etc.  But without sales there is no revenue, and without revenue there is no company.  All the strategic thinking in the world won’t make up for a missed revenue plan.  74HGZA3MZ6SV

Sales was the Sharp End of the Stick, and Marketing was the Stick
The epiphany for me was that in any company where I was running the marketing department, marketing’s number one job (its mission) would be to support sales – and to make the (commission-driven) sales VP the highest-paid person in the company. We were going to do that by turning marketing into a machine to generate end user demand, drive the that demand into our sales channels, and educate our sales channels.  And the same time we were also going to do all the other strategic stuff about pricing, positioning, promotion and customer discovery and validation to help engineering understand customer needs.  But sales came first.

(By the way, companies that have a single individual as the VP of Sales and Marketing have decided that marketing doesn’t add any other value then tactical sales support, and the only way to get is to put it under the VP of Sales.  That’s why you almost never see a marketer as the VP of Sales and Marketing.)

My way of explaining our support and service role to the marketing department was that:

  1. Sales is the sharp end of the stick, and marketing at best, is the stick.
  2. But while the sales team works for commission, the rest of the employees have equity (stock) in the company.
  3. If sales revenue and profits are high enough, we could take the company public or sell it, and the stock would be worth more than the paper it was printed on.
  4. In exchange for being the “point” organization, performance of a salesperson is measured continuously and individuals who fail to deliver quota are removed.
  5. If sales as an organization failed to deliver revenue to plan then all we had were worthless shares.
  6. In reality the sales team was working for the rest of the company to make all of our stock valuable.

No one was confused after that.

Who’s on the Sharp End
In an early stage startup, instead of sales being up front, the point departments are likely to be product development and customer development. Later on in this same company’s life, sales will become the pointy end and product development moves to a supporting role.  In other companies it may be that manufacturing or finance is the sharp end of the stick.  In an IP licensing business, legal and finance are the sharp end of the stick. It varies by company and changes over time.  There’s no magic formula but there are always “leading” departments.  And all “leading” departments have some type of “consequence-based” feedback loops that make success or failure obvious.

The clearest example is the U.S. military.  Combat troops are the “tip of the spear” while everyone else is the logistical tail.  No one in the support chain of the troops is confused or resentful as they all understand that the greatest risk is up at the front.

Killing The Company With Equality
I’ve been on boards where the CEOs took the egalitarian position that “all our departments are equal, no one is more important than any other.”  The unfortunate corollary is that in these companies no department believed it was in a supporting or service role.

In these companies, departments that should have been providing support and service instead behaved like they were the “sharp end” organizations. I’ve encountered finance organizations with budget processes designed to simplify their lives, but not the rest of the company’s. Or expense reporting requirements that took hours of a sales teams time to fill out every week.  Sometimes it was the legal department crafting contracts so onerous I wouldn’t even sign it, let alone expect a customer to do so. At times it was human resources with policies that made people leave rather than stay, or it was a CIO more interested in standards than deployment.

None of these departments operated with any particular sense of malice – just with the certainty that the company revolved around them. But they were misguided because they lacked a clear departmental mission statement that reminded them of the corporate goals. If each department had a mission statement, it would have been clear whether their role was in support or at the sharp end. Having each department develop a mission statement depends on leadership and direction from the CEO.

“Going Out of Business” Strategy
I’m now convinced “all our departments are equal” is a “going out of business” strategy. Not understanding who are the “lead departments” makes companies feel like ponderous, bureaucratic and frustrating places to work.  The best people in the “sharp end” organizations simply vote with their feet and leave.

I loved to compete against these companies.  Their own internal culture would tie them up in knots, and agile startups could run rings around them.

Don’t let this happen to your company.  Embrace and then communicate the idea of a lead department(s).  Build a company culture where everyone supports the “sharp end of the stick.”  

Stay agile, stay focused. 

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Preparing for Chaos – the Life of a Startup

Posted on April 29, 2009 by steve blank

I just finished reading Donovan Campbell’s eye-opening book, “Joker One“, about his harrowing combat tour in Iraq leading a Marine platoon. This book may be the Iraq war equivalent of “Dispatches” which defined Vietnam for my generation.  (Both reminded me why National Service would be a very good idea.)

Campbell describes how he tried to instill in his troops the proper combat mentality.

I’ve paraphrased his speech into the language of a startup.  It’s eerily similar.

Startups are inherently chaos. As a founder you need to prepare yourself to think creatively and independently, because more often than not, conditions on the ground will change so rapidly that the original well-thought-out business plan becomes irrelevant.

If you can’t manage chaos and uncertainty, if you can’t bias yourself for action and if you wait around for someone else to tell you what to do, then your investors and competitors will make your decisions for you and you will run out of money and your company will die.  74HGZA3MZ6SV

Therefore the best way to keep your company alive is to instill in every employee a decisive mindset that can quickly separate the crucial from the irrelevant, synthesize the output, and use this intelligence to create islands of order in the all-out chaos of a startup.

Every potential startup founder should think about their level of comfort operating in chaos and uncertainty.  It may not be for you.

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Supermac War Story 8: Cats and Dogs – Admitting a Mistake

Posted on April 23, 2009 by steve blank

At SuperMac, I thought I was good VP of marketing; aggressive, relentless and would take no prisoners – even with my peers inside the company.  But a series of Zen-like moments helped me move to a different level that changed how I operated.  It didn’t make my marketing skills any worse or better, but moved me to play forever on a different field. 74HGZA3MZ6SV

Zen moment #1- Admitting a mistake and asking for help

Up until this point in my career I had one response anytime I screwed something up: blame someone else. The only variable was how big the screw-up was – that made a difference in whom I blamed.  If it was a very big mistake, I blamed the VP of Sales.  “This marketing campaign didn’t work? It was a brilliant strategy but Sales screwed it up.”  (My own lame defense here for this behavior is that sales and marketing are always cats and dogs in startups. Historically, these were two guys with high testosterone. They hit each other with baseball bats until one of them dropped.)

This first Zen moment happened at a SuperMac exec staff meeting. I was asked to explain why a marketing program that cost $150,000 bucks literally generated nothing in revenue for the company.  I still remember that I was gearing up to go into my ‘I’m going to blame the sales guy’ routine. Since our sales guy was a good street fighter, I knew the ensuing melee would create enough of a distraction that no one would talk about my marketing debacle.  My brain had queued up the standard, “It’s all Sales’s fault,” but instead, what came out of my mouth was, “You know, I really screwed this marketing campaign up, making it successful is important for the company, and I need all your help to fix it.”   You could have heard a pin drop.  It was so out of character, people were shocked.  Some stammered out, “can you say that again?”

Our president picked up on the momentum and asked me what I needed from the rest of the exec team to fix this debacle. I replied:  “This is really important for our success as company and I’m really at a loss why customers didn’t respond the way we expected.  Anybody else got some other ideas?”

From there, the conversation took a different trajectory. It was uncomfortable for some people, because it was new ground  – I was asking for help – wanting to do what was right for the company.

It was definitely a “Zen moment” for me in terms of my career.  From then on when I screwed up, not only did I own up to it, I asked for help.  This behavior had an unintended consequence I couldn’t have predicted: when others started volunteering to help me solve a problem, finding a solution became their goal as well.

Soon one or two others execs tested the waters by making a small tentative “ask” as well.  When they discovered that the sky didn’t fall and they still had their jobs, our corporate culture took one more step toward a more effective and cohesive company.

Ownership and Teamwork not turf.

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The Secret History of Silicon Valley Part V: The Second 100 years

Posted on April 20, 2009 by steve blank

When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.
– The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

I always had been curious about how Silicon Valley, a place I had lived and worked in, came to be.  And throughout my career as an entrepreneur I kept asking questions of my VC investors and friends; Where did the valleys entrepreneurship culture come from?  How did Silicon Valley start? Why here?  Why now? How did this culture of “make it happen” emerge, etc.  And the answer came back much as it did in my past jobs; Who cares, get back to work.

After I retired, and before I started teaching at Stanford, Jerry Engel, director of the Lester Center on Entrepreneurship, at U.C. Berkeley Haas Business School was courageous enough to give me a forum teach the Customer Development Methodology. As I was researching my class text, I thought it would be simple enough to read up on a few histories of the valley and finally get my questions about the genesis of entrepreneurship answered.

The Legend: HP, Intel and Apple
I read all the popular books about the valley and they all told a variant of the same story; “entrepreneurs as heroes” building the Semiconductor and Personal Computer companies: Bill Hewlett and David Packard at HP, Bob Taylor and the team at Xerox PARC, Steve Jobs and Wozniak at Apple, Gordon Moore and Bob Noyce at Intel, etc.  These were inspiring stories, but I realized that, no surprise, the popular press were writing books that had mass appeal. They were all fun reads about plucky entrepreneurs who start from nothing and against all odds, build a successful company.

popular-view-of-silicon-valley-history1

But no one was writing about where the entrepreneurial culture had come from.  Where were the books explaining why were all these chip and computer companies started here?  Why not elsewhere in the country or the world?  With the exception of one great book, no one was writing about our regional advantage. Was it because entrepreneurs keep moving forward and rarely look back? I needed to dig deeper.

The Facts: Vacuum Tube Valley – Our 100th Anniversary
To my surprise, I discovered that yes, Silicon Valley did start in a garage in Palo Alto, but it didn’t start in the Hewlett Packard garage. The first electronics company in Silicon Valley was Federal Telegraph, a vaccum tube company started in 1909 in Palo Alto as Poulsen Wireless.  (The 100th anniversary of Silicon Valley in 2009 went unnoticed and unmentioned by anyone.)  By 1912, Lee Deforest working at Federal Telegraph would invent the Triode, (a tube amplifier) and would go on to become the Steve Jobs of his day – visionary, charismatic and controversial.

* Federal Telegraph and Lee Deforest in Palo Alto are the first major events in what would become Silicon Valley. We need to reset our Silicon Valley birthday calendars to here.

By 1937, when Bill Hewlett and David Packard left Stanford to start HP, the agricultural fields outside of Stanford had already become “Vacuum Tube Valley.” HP was a supplier of electronic test equipment and joined a small but  thriving valley electronics industry with companies like Litton and Eitel and McCollough.

* By the late 1930’s when HP started, a small group (measured in hundreds) of engineers who made radio tubes were building the valleys’ ecosystem for electronics manufacturing, product engineering and technology management.

Who would have known?

Microwave Valley – the 1950’s and ’60’s
There isn’t much written about Silicon Valley during and after World War II.  The story of the valley post war, through the 1950’s, is mostly about the growth of the tube companies and the rise of Hewlett Packard and the birth of Fairchild.  The popular literature has the valley springing to life in the 1960’s with the semiconductor revolution started by Shockley, Fairchild, Signetics, National and Intel, followed by the emergence of the personal computer in the mid 1970’s.

But the more I read, the more I realized that the public history’s of the valley in the 1950’s and ’60’s were incomplete and just plain wrong. The truth was that huge dollars were spent on a large number of companies that never made the press or into the history books. Companies specializing in components and systems that operated in the microwave portion of the electromagnetic spectrum sprouted faster than fruit trees in the valley orchards. In ten years, from the early 1950’s to the early 1960’s, the valley went through a hiring frenzy as jobs in microwave companies went from 700 to 7,000.

This wave of 1950’s/’60’s startups (Watkins-Johnson, Varian, Huggins Labs, MEC, Stewart Engineering, etc.) were making  dizzying array of new microwave components; power grid tubes, klystrons, magnetrons,  backward wave oscillators, traveling wave tubes (TWT’s), cross-field amplifiers, gyrotrons, and on, on…  And literally across the valley, these microwave devices were being built into complete systems for the U.S. military by other new startups;  Sylvania Electronics Defense Laboratory, Granger Associates, Philco, Dalmo Victor, ESL (my first startup in the valley) and Argosystems. In the 1950’s and ’60’s more money was pouring into these companies than on the fledgling chip and computer companies.

* The 10x expansion in the number of engineers in the valley in the 1950’s came from the military and microwaves – before the semiconductor boom. And these microwave engineers were working at startups – not large companies. You never heard of them because their customers were the department of defense, the intelligence community and most often their devices were embedded in classified systems.

When I read the funny names of these microwaves devices… Backward wave oscillators, TWT’s, Magnetrons…long silent memories came back. These components were the heart of the electronic warfare equipment I had worked on; including Wild Weasels and fighter planes in Thailand and on B-52 bombers.  After decades, the story started coming home for me.

The Revolution Wasn’t Televised
What the heck happened here to create this burst of innovation?  What created this microwave startup culture in the 1950’s? And since there was no Venture Capital in the 1950’s/’60’s where was the money coming from?  This startup boom seemed to come out of nowhere.  Why was it occurring here?  And why on earth the sudden military interest in microwaves?

the-real-story-of-silicon-valley1

Part of the answer was that these companies and the military had forged some type of relationship.  And it appeared that Stanford University’s engineering department was in middle of all this. The formation of the military/industrial/university relationships during the Cold War and the relationship between Stanford and the intelligence community in particular, went on untold and out of sight.

While nothing I read described the specific products being worked on, or what specifically was Stanford’s contribution, there were some really tantalizing pointers to who the real customers were (hint, it wasn’t just the “military,”) or why was this work was being done at Stanford.

Few knew that the answers to all these questions pointed to just one guy at the center of it all –  Fred Terman of Stanford University.

* Stanford, the military and our intelligence agencies started the wave of entrepreneurial culture that today’s Silicon Valley takes for granted.

“U.S. Science and National Industrial Policy” on the Part VIa of the “Secret History” posts here.

Filed under: Secret History of Silicon Valley, Technology | Tagged: , , | 14 Comments »

“Speed and Tempo” – Fearless Decision Making for Startups

Posted on April 10, 2009 by steve blank

”If things seem under control, you are just not going fast enough.”

– Mario Andretti

I was catching up over breakfast with a friend who’s now CEO of his own startup. One of the things he mentioned was that when it came to decision-making he still tended to think and act like an engineer. Each and every decision he made was carefully thought through and weighed. And he recognized it was making his startup feel and act like a big ponderous company. 74HGZA3MZ6SV

Speed = Execution Now

General George Patton said, “A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan next week.” The same is true in your company. Most decisions in a startup must be made in the face of uncertainty. Since every situation is unique, there is no perfect solution to any engineering, customer or competitor problem, and you shouldn’t agonize over trying to find one. This doesn’t mean gambling the company’s fortunes on a whim. It means adopting plans with an acceptable degree of risk, and doing it quickly. (Make sure these are fact-based, not faith-based decisions.) In general, the company that consistently makes and implements decisions rapidly gains a tremendous, often decisive, competitive advantage.

Decision Making Heuristics for the Startup CEO

The heuristic I gave my friend was to think of decisions of having two states: those that are reversible and those that are irreversible. An example of a reversible decision could be adding a product feature, a new algorithm in the code, targeting a specific set of customers, etc. If the decision was a bad call you can unwind it in a reasonable period of time. An irreversible decision is firing an employee, launching your product, a five-year lease for an expensive new building, etc. These are usually difficult or impossible to reverse.

My advice was to start a policy of making reversible decisions before anyone left his office or before a meeting ended. In a startup it doesn’t matter if you’re 100% right 100% of the time. What matters is having forward momentum and a tight fact-based feedback loop (i.e. Customer Development) to help you quickly recognize and reverse any incorrect decisions. That’s why startups are agile. By the time a big company gets the committee to organize the subcommittee to pick a meeting date, your startup could have made 20 decisions, reversed five of them and implemented the fifteen that worked.

Tempo = Speed Consistently Over Time

Once you learn how to make decisions quickly you’re not done.  Startups that are agile have mastered one other trick – and that’s Tempo – the ability to make quick decisions consistently over extended periods of time.  Not just for the CEO or the exec staff, but for the entire company.  For a startup Speed and Tempo need to be an integral part of your corporate DNA.

Great startups have a tempo of 10x a large company.

Try it.

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SuperMac War Story 6: Building The Killer Team – Mission, Intent and Values

Posted on April 9, 2009 by steve blank

If you don’t know where you’re going, how will you know when you get there?

At the same time we were educating the press, we began to educate our own marketing department about what exactly we were supposed to be doing inside the company. During the first few weeks I asked each of my department heads what they did for marketing and the company. When I asked our trade show manager she looked at me like I was the house idiot and said, “Steve, don’t you know that my job is to set up our trade show booth?” The other departments in marketing gave the same answers; the product-marketing department said their job was to write data sheets. But my favorite was when the public relations manager said, “we’re here to write press releases and answer the phone in case the press calls.”

If these sound like reasonable answers to you, and you are in a startup/small company, update your resume.

Titles are not your job
When I pressed my staff to explain why marketing did trade shows, or wrote press releases or penned data sheets, the best I could get was “why that’s our job.” It dawned on me that we had a department full of people who were confusing their titles with what contribution they were supposed to be making to the company. While their titles might be what their business cards said, titles were not their job – at least in any marketing department I was running.

Titles are not the same as what your job is. This is a big idea.

Department Mission Statements – What am I Supposed to Do Today
It wasn’t that we somehow had inherited dumb employees. What I was actually hearing was a failure of management. No one had sat the marketing department down and defined what our department Mission (with a capital “M”) was.

Most startups put together a corporate mission statement because the CEO remembered seeing one at their last job, or the investors said they needed one. Most companies spend an inordinate amount of time crafting a finely honed corporate mission statement for external consumption and then do nothing internally to actually make it happen. (And to this day I can’t remember if we even had a corporate mission statement.) What I’m about to describe here is quite different.

What was missing in SuperMac marketing was anything in writing that gave the marketing staff daily guidance on what they should be doing. The first reaction from my CEO was, “that’s why you’re running the department.” And yes, we could have built a top-down, command-and-control hierarchy. But what I wanted was an agile marketing team capable of operating independently without day-to-day direction.

So what we needed to do was to craft a Departmental Mission statement that told everyone why they come to work, what they need to do, and how they will know they have succeeded. And it was going to mention the two words that SuperMac marketing needed to live and breathe: revenue and profit.

Five Easy Pieces – The Marketing Mission
After a few months of talking to customers, talking to our channel and working with sales we defined the marketing Mission (our job) was to:
Help Sales deliver $25 million in sales with a 45% gross margin. To do that we will create end-user demand and drive it into the sales channel, educate the channel and customers about why our products are superior, and help Engineering understand customer needs and desires. We will accomplish this through demand-creation activities (advertising, PR, tradeshows, seminars, web sites, etc.), competitive analyses, channel and customer collateral (white papers, data sheets, product reviews), customer surveys, and market requirements documents.

This year, marketing need to provide sales with 40,000 active and accepted leads, company and product name recognition over 65% in our target market, and five positive product reviews per quarter. We will reach 35% market share in year one of sales with a headcount of twenty people, spending less than $4,000,000.

  • Generate end user demand (to match our revenue goals)
  • Drive that demand into our sales channels
  • Value price our products to achieve our revenue and margin goals (create high-value)
  • Educate our sales channel(s)
  • Help engineering understand customer needs

That was it. Two paragraphs, Five bullets. It didn’t take more.

Working to the Mission
Having the mission in place meant that our marketing team could see that what mattered was not what their business card said, but how much closer did their work move our department to completing the mission. Period.

It wasn’t an easy concept for everyone to understand.

Building the Team
My new Director of Marketing Communications turned the Marcom departments into a mission-focused organization. Her new tradeshow manager quickly came to understand that their job was not to set up booths. We hired union laborers to do that. A trade show was where our company went to create awareness and/or leads. And if you ran the tradeshow department you owned the responsibility of awareness and leads. The booth was incidental. I couldn’t care less if we had a booth or not if we could generate the same amount of leads and awareness by skydiving naked into a coffee cup.

The same was true for PR. My new head of Public Relations quickly learned that my admin could answer calls from the press. The job of Public Relations at SuperMac wasn’t a passive “write a press release and wait for something to happen activity.” It wasn’t measured by how busy you were, it was measured by results. And the results weren’t the traditional PR metrics of number of articles or inches of ink. I couldn’t care less about those. I wanted our PR department to get close and personal with the press and use it to generate end user demand and then drive that demand into our sales channel. (The Potrero benchmark strategy was one component of this creating end user demand through PR.) We were constantly creating metrics to see the effects of different PR messages, channels and audiences on end-user purchases.

The same was true for the Product Marketing group. I hired a Director of Product Marketing who in his last company had ran its marketing and then went out into the field and became its national sales director. He got the job when I asked him how much of his own marketing material his sales team actually used in the field. When he said, “about ten percent,” I knew by the embarrassed look on his face I had found the right guy. And our Director of Technical Marketing was superb at understanding customer needs and communicating them to engineering.

Teaching Mission Intent – What’s Really Important
With a great team in place, the next step was recognizing that our Mission statement might change on the fly. “Hey, we just all bought into this Mission idea and now you’re telling us it can change?!”

We introduced the notion of Mission intent. What is the company goal behind the mission. In our case it was to sell $25 million in graphics boards with 45% gross margin. The idea of intention is that if employees understand the thinking behind the mission, they can work collaboratively to achieve it.

But we recognized that there would be time marketing would screw up, making the mission obsolete (i.e. we might fail to deliver 40,000 leads.) Think of intention as the answer to the adage, “When you are up to your neck in alligators it’s hard to remember you were supposed to drain the swamp.” For example; our mission said that the reason why marketing needed to deliver 40,000 leads and 35% market share, etc, was so that the company could sell $25 million in graphics boards at 45% gross margin.

What we taught everyone is that the intention is more enduring then the mission. (“Let’s see, the company is trying to sell $25 million in graphics boards with 45% gross margin. If marketing can’t deliver the 40,000 leads what else can we do for sales to still achieve our revenue and profitability?”) The mission was our goal, but based on circumstances it may change, but the Intent was immovable.

When faced with the time pressures of a startup, too many demands and too few people, we began to teach our staff to refer back to the five Mission goals and the Intent of the department. When stuff started piling up on their desks, they learned to ask themselves, “Is what I’m working on furthering these goals? If so, which one? If not, why am I doing it?”

They understood the mission intent was our corporate revenue and profit goals.

Core Values
Even after we had Mission and Intent down pat, one of the things that still drove me crazy was when we failed to deliver a project for sales on time or we missed a media deadline, everyone in my department had an excuse. (Since a large part of marketing was as a service organization to sales, our inability to deliver on time meant we weren’t holding up our end of the mission.) I realized that this was a broken part of our culture, but couldn’t figure out why. And one day it hit me that when deadlines slipped there were no consequences.

And with no consequences we acted as if schedules and commitments really didn’t matter. I heard a constant refrain of, “The channel sales brochure was late because the vendor got busy and they couldn’t meet the original deadline.” Or, “the January ad had to be moved into February because my graphic artist was sick but I didn’t tell you assuming it was OK.” Or, “we’re going to slip our product launch because the team thought they couldn’t get ready in time.” We had  a culture that had no accountability, and no consequences –  instead there were simply shrugged shoulders and a litany of excuses.

This had to change. I wanted a department that could be counted on delivering. One day I simply put up a sign on my door that said, “No excuses accepted.” And I let the department know what I meant was we were all going to be “accountable.”

What I didn’t mean was “deliver or else.” By accountable I meant, “we agreed on a delivery date, and between now and the delivery date it’s OK if you ask for help because you’re stuck, or something happened outside of your control. But do not walk into my office the day something was due and give me an excuse. It will cost you your job.” That kind of accountable.

And, “since I won’t accept those kind of excuses, you are no longer authorized to accept them from your staff or vendors either.” The goal wasn’t inflexible dates and deadlines, it was no surprises and collective problem solving.  After that, we  spent a lot more time working together to solve problems and remove obstacles in getting things done on-time.

Over time, accountability, execution, honesty and integrity became the cornerstones of our communication with each other, other departments and vendors.

  • We wouldn’t give excuses for failures, just facts and requests for help
  • We wouldn’t accept excuses for failures, just facts, and offer help
  • Relentless execution
  • Individual honesty and integrity

That was it. Four bullets. It defined our culture.

Why Do It
By the end of the first year our team had jelled. It was a department willing to exercise initiative, had the judgment to act wisely, and an eagerness to accept responsibility.

I remember at the end of a hard week my direct reports came into my office just to talk about the weeks little victories. And there was a moment as they shared their stories, that they all began to realize that our company (one that had just come off of life support) was beginning to kick the rear of our better-funded and bigger competitors.

We all marveled in the moment.

What did I learn so far?

  • Push independent execution of tasks down to the lowest possible level
  • Give everyone a shared Mission Statement: why they come to work, what they need to do, and how they will know they have succeeded.
  • Share Mission Intent for the big picture for the Mission Statement
  • Build a team comfortable with independent Mission execution
  • Agree on Core Values to define your culture

Filed under: Customer Development, Family/Career/Culture, SuperMac, Technology | Tagged: , , , , | 12 Comments »

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