Entrepreneurship

This week I talked to two people who admitted that their email inboxes were overflowing and that their voice mail had stopped taking messages because they had hit their limit. Maybe it is the season as everyone is trying to finish out the year, but a lot of people just have trouble managing their emails and tasks.

Over the years I’ve worked on a system that keeps my task list and email under control, most of the time.

To get your email and task list under control, you probably have to first admit that it is out of control.  Symptoms are:

• More than a dozen emails in the inbox.
• Email folders with names like Urgent, Today, To Read, Hot, etc.
• Your inbox contains several very important emails, but to find them, when you think of them, you look at all the stuff that isn’t important or urgent.
• You are saving voice mails so that when you have time you can go back and deal with them.

I often see inboxes that have hundreds of read and unread emails.  You are probably thinking that the only way to get to twelve, much less to zero, would be to just delete everything and start over.  (I just checked, my inbox has five emails in it.  It’s not that I don’t get a lot of emails either.  These came in during the last twenty minutes and today is a light email day since it is the day before Thanksgiving)

Symptoms of an out-of-control task list are:

• You aren’t sure what a task list is
• You can’t find your task list
• You have multiple task lists and your monitor is growing yellow sticky notes
• People have learned to remind you of what you need to do, or you find yourself saying to people “Remind me that I have to . . .”

I have to admit that I am by nature not very organized, and I don’t always follow my system, so on occasion I accidentally let something fall through the cracks.  But without my system, I would have a lot more stress in my life, I would more often than not be working on unimportant tasks and I certainly wouldn’t get as much done as I do now.

Here are the basics.  If there is interest, I’ll write more about how it works.

Use one task list.  I keep mine with me all the time, so I use the one that is built into Outlook and I keep it sync’d with my PocketPC.  Most of the time I’m dealing with the version on my Pocket PC.  I almost never write to-dos down on sticky notes or on the back of business cards.  If I do, I transfer it to my task list as soon as possible.  This is very important.  Multiple lists are error prone and cause stress, because if your brain is not convinced that you are handling everything it will constantly interrupt you for reassurance that you aren’t forgetting something.  If my brain comes up with something that I should do, I put it on the task list.  (When I first committed to this system, my task list had hundreds of items on it, but trust me, it is for the best.)

Follow the age-old advice of “touch it once.”  Before email, people were overwhelmed by paper mail, memos and little pink message slips.  Try to avoid cycling back through the email in your inbox over and over again.  When I sit down to read email in the morning, for every email, I will:

• Read it and delete it
• Read it, reply or forward it and delete it (maybe file it)
• Read it and file it for future reference
• Or if I just can’t or won’t deal with it right then, I read it and then drag it onto my task list.

In Outlook, you can drag an email over to the task list icon and it will create a new task with the body of the email in the notes.  During the day I do sometimes quickly read an email and leave it in my inbox, but I try not to, and I ALWAYS start every day with an empty inbox. No matter what, I take the time to clean it out first thing in the morning.  At the end of the session, which usually only lasts a few minutes because I’m not starting with hundreds of emails, I have an empty inbox and a task list with a few more items on it.  I also try to end the evening with an empty inbox and a completed task list of the day’s tasks.

By using the task list in Outlook, I easily prioritize and categorize everything that I need to do.  When I can look at a priority sorted, categorized list, it is much easier to decide what is important and what to work on next.  If I’m not going to work on a task today, I defer it to tomorrow so that I don’t have to think about everything that I need to do in the future.  It isn’t productive and it distracts from today’s tasks.

Trust me, you can reduce stress, get more done in less time and amaze your friends with your empty inbox. If there is interest, leave a comment and I’ll write more about how I categorize because it is a big part of the system.  You too can have an empty inbox.

Like most people, I’m still trying to figure out how to help and how to make sense of what went wrong.  While it seems that the news is suddenly reporting progress being made, the first few days after Katrina had me wanting to commandeer a bus and go down and get people out of there myself.  I would have had no shortage of people willing to go along I’m sure.

We heard that this could not have been predicted, but if you read this National Geographic Article from October, 2004 you will find yourself checking the date a couple of times because it reads just like a news report from last week.  If you keep reading you will see that there was a proposal to spend 30 billion dollars over 10 years to try to fix the problem, but that was cut to 2 billion dollars over the next ten years.  Unfortunately it will now cost many times that, not to mention the terrible loss of life.  Having grown up on the Ohio River and seen it get out of its banks many times, I’m familiar with the argument that dams and levees work to a point, and then they just make things worse.  Ultimately nature will have its way.

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This Sunday morning I was waiting at the gate for my plane. Generally I hate traveling on the weekend unless I’m on vacation but the
customer could only do a Monday morning meeting.

Someone else was traveling on business too – I’ll
call him "Mr. yellow shirt." Mr. Yellow Shirt was distressed. Not only had he
forgot to wear a belt, but he had also forgot his network access password.  (Gold Systems just release a password reset application,  but I am not making up this story as an excuse to blog about it. This
really did happen.)

Mr. Yellow Shirt just had to have access to the
network. His business Card, in plain view on his laptop case,
indicated that he worked for a Really Big Consulting Firm. He whipped out his
cell phone, punched a speed-dial button and waited patiently. "Norman, hey buddy
I’m sorry to call you at home on a Sunday morning but my password isn’t working
and I really need access to the network." Long pause, presumably as Norm gets out
of bed and logs into the network to reset Mr. Yellow Shirt’s Password. Passwords
generally don’t just "stop working", but I’m guessing they both know that Mr.
Yellow Shirt just forgot his password again. Now that Sarbanes-Oxley (or more correctly, the people interpreting SOX) is
mandating frequently password changes, this sort of call is happening a lot
these days.

"Hey OK, that’s great – Q W E R T Y . Just a second,
let me write that down . . . OK, that’s Q . . ." At this point Norm must have
told him not to repeat his password out loud in a busy airport where anyone
could be listening. Norm probably also made a mental note to give out even
easier passwords than the top 6 letters on the keyboard because the only thing
worse than saying a password out loud in public is to write it down.

Mr. Yellow Shirt thanked Norm again for helping him
out and wished him a good rest of the weekend. I’m sure Norm appreciated the
wake up call and the chance to start his day bright and early. Just then they started boarding our
flight and Mr. Yellow Shirt hurried off to his business class seat without
getting a chance to login and change his password from "Qwerty" to something
easier to remember. According to the in-flight map, Mr. Yellow Shirt and I are
just now passing over Harlan County Lake, Nebraska. The temporary Password that
Norm assigned probably just expired, so Norm’s going to get another call this
afternoon.

This is a true story and it is costing help desks
and IT departments time, money and security. Norm, if you are reading this give
me a call and let me tell you how Gold Systems’ Password Reset could have let
Mr. Yellow Shirt reset his own password securely using just his voice and a
telephone. It’s less than the cost of even one of your help desk agents and it
works 24 hours a day. (Don’t they have better things to do? Gartner estimates
that about 25% of all calls to help desks are now password reset requests.) With an
automated solution, you don’t have to worry about the help desk giving out passwords to a
cracker with a good story. Even better, you could have slept in this morning. 

Out of the blue, my friend Bob
Levin called to say he finally got around to reading Peopleware
by Tom Demarco and Timothy Lister.  We spent the next hour talking about
offices versus cubical, diversity and half a dozen other topics.  Bob’s
one of those guys that I can just bounce all over the place with exploring
interesting ideas and I always go away being more motivated because he often
reminds me why I became an entrepreneur in the first place.

Peopleware probably was the first book I read that made me think, "maybe I
could start a business someday".  It’s a great book that tries to get
to the question of how to create a great development team.  There are lots
of specific conclusions based on research about what can be done to make people
more productive and happy with their work.  For instance, they found that there
is a correlation to the amount of uninterrupted time a person spends at work
and their productivity.  It is why
everyone at Gold Systems has an office (OK, there is one exception) and why
every office has a door.

By the way, I’m not against cubicles or open space. I’ve offered to build out cubes for anyone
who thinks they would be happier or more productive, because that’s really all
I care about. We’re incorporating Agile
development processes into our product development process, and the team has
their War Room, so I’m all for creating the space that people need.

I was just flipping through the book again and realized that
a story I like to tell actually came from this book. A developer was working on a very complicated
problem. He was sitting at his desk with
his feet propped up on the desk staring into space. His boss came by and said “Wendl! What are you doing?” Wendl said “I’m thinking.” And the boss said, “Can’t you do that at
home?” It sounds like a Dilbert cartoon,
but as far as I can tell Scott Adams didn’t come up with this one.

I highly recommend Peopleware. It is becoming a little dated though it was
revised in 1998, so get the second edition. I’ve just put it on my reading stack again. Flipping through it has convinced me that it
is still a great book and I need to review the lessons I learned the first time
I read it.  Thanks for reminding me Bob!

Since I wrote my post on Jarbarish, I’ve been getting a lot of examples of how we as business people often don’t speak clearly.

I haven’t read this book yet, but I like the title:  Why Business People Speak Like Idiots:   A Bullfighter’s Guide.  It has great reviews on amazon.com, so I’m putting it on my wishlist. 

I recently read Success on the Step – Flying with Kenmore Air by C. Marin Faure and it definitely makes my list of Five Star books for Entrepreneurs.  I picked this up at the Museum of Flight in Seattle.  It isn’t even available on Amazon.com which is too bad, but you can order it directly from the Kenmore Air website above.

If you’ve ever been to Seattle, more than likely you’ve seen a Kenmore Air float plane fly overhead.  You might of thought that they are just a sightseeing company, but they are much more than that.  Many people have depended on Kenmore Air since 1945 when it was founded by Reginald Collins, Jack Mines and Robert Munro.

Success on the Step tells a true story of entrepreneurship, bush planes and Alaskan and Canadian adventure.  If like me you love great stories about people who just won’t quit, airplanes and anything having to do with the water, then this book is for you.

With the company only about a year old they lost their pilot when Jack Mines was killed in an accident.  It would have been easy for Collins and Munro to quit at that point, get nice safe jobs at Boeing and live comfortable lives.  They didn’t though, and now the world has another great company that’s been built on integrity and doing what is right for the customer.

I have never flown with Kenmore Air, but the next time I’m in Seattle I’m going to take a flight with them.  I only wish that Bob Monroe was still flying – I think we’d have a lot to talk about.

Chris Scoggins of Sequel Venture Partners invited me to be part of a panel discussion on "funding growth" at our local AeA Chapter.  AeA was founded in 1943 by a group of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, including Hewlett and Packard (the people, not the company) and it now serves companies in the high-tech industry internationally.  I felt that there were many people who had more experience than I did in the audience who could have taken my seat on the panel, but it was fun in any case.  I don’t know if Chris realized that when he came up with the VC and the Banker to join me on the panel that he picked MY VC and MY Banker.  That made it all the more fun.

Chris Wand of Mobius Ventures represented the VC point of view.  Until recently Chris was an observer on my board. (Actually he did a ton of work – the title didn’t fit the job, and he’s contributed a lot to Gold Systems over the years.)  Frank Amoroso from Silicon Valley Bank represented the banker’s point of view.

Taking money from a VC is a little like signing up for a "No interest, no payments" deal with a big balloon payment at the end, except the credit check is much tougher (usually) and it isn’t always clear when the note will come due.  In fact the due date can change based on how your company is performing.  When I took VC money I felt like I knew what I was getting into, in fact I still have the date and time written on my whiteboard wall when my team and I decided to go for it.  (2/14/01 2:48PM)  I said then that taking VC money is like lighting a fuse, and time will tell whether it is a fuse to a rocket to the moon or a bomb.  I don’t mean for this to sound at all negative.  My experience (so far) has been very, very positive, but I think that entrepreneurs should be very clear about why they are taking outside investments and they should understand what is going to be expected of them and their company.

Chris reminded people that ultimately bringing in a VC investment is about money.  If you are lucky (he says) you will also get access to contacts, a discipline will be instilled and you get to benefit from the VC’s "pattern recognition" ability.  I’ve benefited from all three.  I’ve met people I couldn’t have met on my own, my planning and reporting is better than it ever would have been without someone looking over my shoulder, and the "pattern recognition" has saved me from more pain than I can imagine.  Chris, who’s a fairly young VC, has seen more stuff go wrong and right in companies than I’ll ever see in my lifetime.  Just knowing that there could be a problem is a great help.  Having a VC who can point out problems in a constructive way is invaluable.

Frank talked about how banking is different for VC backed companies, and how SVB is positioned to do things that other banks might not be able to do.  When we switched to SVB soon after we were funded, I failed to do something that I had done well with our previous bank.  When we worked with Bob Sinton at Bank of Boulder, now First National Bank of Colorado, I did my best to educate Bob on my business.  In the early days I went so far as to give him catalogs of companies that bought telecommunications equipment just so he would feel good that our equipment (which secured our loan) was valuable.  I think we are past that now, but I should have spent more time educating Frank on our business, why our customers always pay us and why we were a good bet.  It was a case of delegating too much, and I’ve done my best to take this on personally more recently.

Frank made the point that "debt funds assets, not expenses."  In other words, a bank can loan you money to buy things that generate cash, but they aren’t there to pay your bills for you.  Assets that a bank can fund include equipment, but they can also fund accounts receivables and provide cash for acquisitions in some cases.

I’m still indebted (figuratively, not literally) to Bob at First National Bank of Boulder.  He loaned us money to buy AT&T equipment, to do work for AT&T, when AT&T wouldn’t even lease the equipment to us.  Frank at SVB has done a great job of working with us now that we are no longer a boot-strapped company.  I’d recommend either without hesitation.

Too many entrepreneurs in the past have declared victory when they successfully raised VC money.  In my mind, it is just another way to fund the growth of a company and it is the beginning of a process, not the end.

Several people noticed that my links to the MouseDriver site were broken.  (Thanks)

Kyle Harrison and John Lusk both responded to my email asking what had happened and they let me know that they’ve transferred the MouseDriver domain to the new owners of the company, but they’ve saved the the original site and newsletters.

So, if you want to buy a computer mouse that looks like a golf club, check out www.mousedriver.com, but if you want to read the story about how two guys fresh out of MBA school started a traditional company in the middle of the dot com boom, check out www.mousedriverchronicles.com.  I suggest you just buy their book – The Mouse Driver Chronicles – if you are tired of the typical business book or the "business lessons wrapped up in a lame parable" genre, get this book because it is the real stuff.  It will take you on their roller coaster and give you a good feel for what it is really like to be an entrepreneur.  If you are already an entrepreneur, you’ll enjoy watching someone else ride the roller coaster for a change!

I just noticed that all of the newsletters that they wrote as they built the company are available as a single pdf here.  I looked at it enough to realize that is different from the book and well worth reading on the flight home today.  Thanks John and Kyle for sharing your story!

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This is the fourth post about presentations given by speakers at the
YPO Inventing Your Future Markets event.  To see other posts about this
event just look for the Category "YPO Inventing Your Future Markets,
March 2005" in the Categories section on the right.

This was my second encounter with Geoffrey Smart, but first a little background on him.  His dad, Bradford Smart, wrote the book Topgrading: How Leading Companies Win by Hiring, Coaching and Keeping the Best People.   I don’t think he invented the term "A Player" but his and Geoffrey’s consulting practice have given it a lot of press.  The book is worth checking out I think, because it gives a good course on interviewing that the Smart’s and others that I know claim will dramatically increase your hiring success rate.  Verne Harnish, author of Mastering the Rockefeller Habits, contributor to Forbes Small Business and the leader of his own very successful firm, Gazelles, is a big fan of Topgrading.  Verne’s a good friend who’s helped me with Gold Systems, plus he has got me in front of Jim Collins not once but twice, so I tend to listen to him!

Now for my story.  Near the end of the dot com boom we were trying to raise another round of VC money.  We got through a lot of tough but interesting interviews, pitches and planning sessions with a local VC firm.  I was feeling pretty good about it.  The last step was to meet one other partner and be interviewed by Geoffrey Smart.  Geoff came off as a nice guy with no tricks and a real interest in learning more about me.  He put me through his "Chronological In-Depth Structured Interview"  In the end Geoff recommended against me, feeling like I had not shown that I had what it would take to hire the best people.  At the time I was really disappointed, but in fact he was right.  It was a problem that I had been struggling with.  Too many times I had hired the wrong person and then made the problem worse by waiting way too long to deal with the problem.  It has taken me years to get better at this, and this particular interview and disappointment was one of the kicks in the pants that I needed to get better.

So I would still recommend that you check out Topgrading.  And Geoff, if you happen to read this, I came up after your presentation to thank you but the line was too long to get to you before the next presentation.  No hard feelings, and I now look back and I’m very thankful for how things worked out.  I’m very happy with my current investors, and you helped me be a better leader.  Thank you for your thoughtful and honest appraisal and good luck with your efforts to teach other leaders to do the same.  I think we’d have a different conversation this time around.

This is the third post about presentations given by speakers at the
YPO Inventing Your Future Markets event.  To see other posts about this
event just look for the Category "YPO Inventing Your Future Markets,
March 2005" in the Categories section on the right.

General Krulak began his 35 year career in the Marines on the ground in Viet Nam.  His stories about leadership under fire with people dying all around him came across as sincere from a man who seemed to care very much for his people and who had come to believe that war is a terrible thing to be avoided at almost any cost.  He commented on the current war and said that it is impossible to fight ideas with guns.

He finished his career as Commandant of the Marine Corps and a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.  In an interview where he announced his retirement, he said he was going to go surfing.  Apparently that didn’t last long, because he went on to be a leader at MBNA, holding several positions including Senior Vice Chairman and CEO of MBNA Europe.

He continues to draw on his military career for leadership lessons.  Apparently in the Marines, a leader has control of a Tactical Area of Responsibility, or TAOR.  Everything in it belongs to the leader who owns that TAOR.  No matter what happens, good or bad it belongs to that leader, no excuses.  I have a saying "Leaders give credit and take responsibility" and I believe the General would agree with that.  He would not want to hear one of his leaders blaming a member of their team for causing the team to fail to meet an objective.

He said that "The only thing you own is your integrity and you, and you alone, can give it away.  Once given away it is very hard to get it back."  He defines character as selflessness, great moral courage, great integrity.

Someone in the audience asked him what his greatest failure was.  He said it was having a singular, laser focus on his career early in his career to the exclusion of everything else including his family.  Fortunately he says he figured that out before it was too late and he turned it around.  The interesting thing is that he said that when he put more balance into his life, his career took off.

Finally he said that even in battle there is always time to think it through.  Even if it causes turmoil as people around you are demanding a decision.  He said that being a decisive leader has nothing to do with time.

It’s impossible to know someone in such a short time, but I left the presentation feeling that General Krulak is a good man.  I might disagree with some of his politics, but I believe he’s a good man with good lessons to share and it was a pleasure to hear him speak.

This is the second post about presentations given by speakers at the YPO Inventing Your Future Markets event.  To see other posts about this event just look for the Category "YPO Inventing Your Future Markets, March 2005" in the Categories section on the right.

Dipankar Chakravarti is like many of the Professors at the CU Leeds School of Business.  He’s an experienced business person first who at some point in his career discovered his passion for teaching others and researching the problems of business in the real world.  He’s a Ph.D. now, but he started out as an electrical engineer and worked in a factory in India.

Like Frances Hesselbein before him, Dr. Chakravarti is a fan of Peter Drucker, and recommended two of his books specifically.  They are Innovation and Entrepreneurship and Practice of Management.  He also quoted Clayton Christensen several times and said that "The incumbent’s road to failure is paved with good management."  I know from experience that it is so hard to find the balance between "fast and loose" and "process and procedure."  The problem is that "innovation undermines established resources, processes and value systems."  In other words, innovation is a threat and established businesses become very good at eliminating threats of any kind.

The financial deck is also stacked against innovation because "ROI criteria breeds fear of small early numerators and large early denominators."  ROI means big returns over small expenses, so a focus on ROI is going to make it harder to innovate.  (Of course if the returns over expenses equation is less than one for long, it makes it hard to stay in business!)

Dr. Chakravarti says that if you are trying to innovate, the focus should not be on management or measurement.

There are three main areas where innovation can be successful.

1. Simple new products or services to attract new customers that could not play before.  Lower prices or new channels or new communications modes are used to get to these customers.
2. Upmarket innovations to attract under served customers.  Broader, more complex functions and price premiums get to these customers.  Who knew that there was a group of coffee drinkers that wanted more than a cheap cup of coffee?  Starbucks figured that out.
3. Low-end innovations that serve previously ignored customers with simpler, more affordable offerings.  Similar to number one, but this is delivering the same products as before but cheaper.

Dr. Chakravarti cautioned us to avoid a couple of typical mistakes.  When you are innovating you’re going after an incumbent.  You might be introducing a totally new product or concept, but you are taking revenue from someone who’s gotten used to getting that revenue.  Competing on price with the incumbent is a bad idea unless you’ve found a way to create a much better margin for yourself.  In a pure price war, the incumbent wins.  Also you must resist the urge to malign the incumbent’s image which will only provoke a predatory attack. 

He suggests we look for ways to transcend industry and market boundaries to get to different elements of the buyer chain and different user groups.  He suggested tying in complementary product and service offerings.  In other words, expand what you’re doing before going after entirely new markets.

Most people would probably say that the market loves innovation, but it doesn’t.  Markets resist new ideas.  The market is a foe of initial adoption, but because our world is becoming highly networked, once an idea starts to take off it can spread faster than in the past because the network effects kick in.

I liked one of his quotes – "Innovation is difficult because it tries to change things."

Once again I feel like I haven’t done this presentation justice.  Dr. Chakravarti made great points and did it in a way that was often funny and clever.  Innovation isn’t easy and the market actually works against it in the early stages.