Entrepreneurship

The first speaker at the YPO Inventing Your Future Markets event today was Frances Hesselbein.  She is the Chairman of the Leader to Leader Institute, (Formerly the Peter F. Drucker Foundation for Nonprofit Management)  Yes, THAT Peter Drucker.  She was CEO of the Girl Scouts from 1976 to 1990 and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1998, the nation’s highest civilian honor.  If you think you’ve done a lot, read her bio and then set your sights higher.  I believe that even if I had not known her accomplishments, I would have still felt like I was in the room with a great person.  There was something about her that is hard to describe and I wasn’t the only one to feel it.

She opened with a quote:

BE CAREFUL

Be careful of your thoughts
for your thoughts become your word.
Be careful of your words
for your words become your actions.
Be careful of your actions
for your actions become your habits.
Be careful of your habits
for your habits become your character.
Be careful of your character
for your character becomes your destiny.

-Unknown

Her message was one of hope and our ability to make the world a better place for all people, but she quoted John W. Gardner as a caution: "This nation could die of comfortable indifference."  She challenged this room full of CEOs to serve other people and to shine a light in the darkest corners.  She said that Peter Drucker is "not a pessimist, but he is very sober about the future."

Ms. Hesselbein is known for flattening organizations and driving decision making down into the organization.  She called it circular management and it is flat, flexible and fluid.  At the Girl Scouts she did away with the typical org chart.  She mentioned several times that she believes the power of language is indispensable.  Regarding the org chart, if you are truly going to be flat, flexible and fluid, you can not use words like subordinate, boss, and even up or down in the organization.  That doesn’t mean there isn’t clear accountability however, but it is more to the team than to a boss.

She quoted George Bernard Shaw as saying he wanted to be "thoroughly used up when I die."  Ms. Hesselbein has had a long distinguished career, but I would bet that she accomplishes more in the next 20 years than most of us will in our entire lives.

She is very concerned, but also optimistic about the youth of the world and their future.  It costs $80,000 a year to incarcerate a 16 year old boy, and we’re going to pay for it one way or the other if they don’t see a future.  She wrapped up by quoting Peter Drucker who would say at the end of an event like this, "What are you going to do on Monday?"  Her challenge was to "Do something about the education of children."

I wish my writing ability was up to the task of conveying her message.  The leadertoleader.org website is a great place to go for more of her vision and some great writing on making your company and the world a better place.  Her latest book is Hesselbein on Leadership and her co-author is Jim Collins, author of Built to Last and Good to Great.  That Jim Collins is her co-author should tell you something about this amazing person too.

I just spent the day at an event put on by the Rocky Mountain and Colorado Chapters of the Young Presidents Organization (YPO) and the University of Colorado Leeds School of Business.  In addition to YPO members there were WPO and CEO members there.  I’m a big believer in entrepreneur peer groups, and these are some of the best.  Everywhere I turned today there was someone to learn from, so it would have been a great day even if the speakers hadn’t shown up.

I’m going to do a separate post about each of the speakers, because I got something great out of each of the presentations.  I’d like to share what I heard, but also hopefully by writing about it, more of it will be there for me on Monday morning when I go back to the office and try to put some of the lessons learned to work.  That really is the test of an event like this.  If you just feel better for a couple of days, it’s not worth the time but if you go back and make even one good idea work, then the time invested can be repaid many times over.

So far we’ve seen Frances Hesselbein, Dipankar Chakravarti, General Charles C. Krulak (ret), Geoffrey Smart, Bala Balachandran, David Stoup and Lisa Ford.  All have been amazingly successful in different ways and each gave a great presentation today.  More later . . .

I saw an email from someone we work with today, and it essentially said, "This is our policy, take it or leave it."  Policy is a fine word that can have clear meaning in the right context.  If I go to Wal-Mart and ask "what is your return policy on this pair of tennis shoes that I bought last week, that now I realize is the wrong size" it is pretty clear what I mean.  I’m not looking to renegotiate the buyer-seller contract, I just want to know if I’m going to get my money back or be able to exchange the shoes for a pair that fit my size 12s.

But there are other meanings to the word "policy."  It can be used to mean "I don’t want to hear your problems or your opinion."  It can mean "I’m not even going to tell you who made up this rule.  It wasn’t me, and if I did know who to talk to about it, I’m not in a position to try to get it changed."  At its worst, it can mean "tough, go away if you don’t like it."

I just looked up the definition of "Policy" and I was surprised that at least according to my dictionary, it means 1. wise management 2. any governing principle, plan, etc.  (See Police)

I’ve never seen anyone suggest that a policy was "a governing principle."  If that were really how most people used the word, I wouldn’t have had such a negative reaction.  We don’t have a lot of policy at Gold Systems because I think most issues are best handled with the latest facts and the best judgment.  To try to create Policy in advance of a situation is very difficult.  I’m all for process, guidelines, plans, principles, but for me Policy is too limiting in most situations.

Many years ago I worked for a very large corporation.  I needed to back up a computer that for some reason was not on the corporate network.  In other words, if I didn’t back it up and it someone accidently formatted the disk, our project was gone.  I went to the supply room and requested ten tapes so that I could implement a rotating backup. I was told that it was Company Policy to allow an individual to get only two tapes per year, because people were using too many tapes.  Now my first thought was "are you saying that people are doing too good of a job backing up their computers?" but that seemed highly unlikely and just plain stupid.  Perhaps someone was stealing the tapes?  If that was the problem, why not just fire the person who’s signing for lots of tapes with no good justification?  I didn’t argue with the person though, I just spent the next couple of hours walking around until I found four other people willing to go to the stock room and give me their yearly tape allotment.

That little story about a Company Policy on backup tapes perfectly illustrates the problem with most Policy.  This particular Policy didn’t keep me from getting the tapes I needed.  And if I was a criminal with a good fence for proprietary tapes cartridges, it still wouldn’t have stopped me.  So it wasted the good person’s time and it didn’t stop the bad guy.  "But wait!" you say.  The problem was that the Policy didn’t go far enough – they could have been more clear with the policy and they could have written even more rules around bringing in your friends to get around the limitation.  Ah, but then you go from Policy to Bureaucracy, which is tomorrow’s word of the day.

If you are a customer, partner or employee of my company, and you feel we’re hiding behind the word Policy, give me a call at 303 381 6700. I love blowing up dumb policies.

Matt Branaugh from Boulder‘s Daily Camera newspaper emailed me tonight to say that his February 24th Tech Range column will reference one of my blog posts about Jarbarish.  Jarbarish is a word my wife Cindy and I coined that comes from the words "Jargon" and "Gibberish".  I get so tired of hearing people say things that have little or no meaning.  I hear jarbarish at trade shows, in sales presentations and I see it in almost every press release. 

Matt and I talked about jarbarish a couple of weeks ago, and he’s tired of it too.  He gets countless press releases from entrepreneurs and marketing people hoping to get his attention.  We laughed about how almost every single company claims to be "The Leader" at something, even if they haven’t sold their first dollar’s worth of product.  Then they dress up what they do with words like "upside opportunity", "value-add", "touch-points" and "paradigm shifts." I suspect these press releases are written by people who love to “think out of the box” and go for the “low hanging fruit.”

Here are a couple of hints.  If your press release causes your newspaper columnist to laugh out loud at the absurdity of your claims or your choice of words, you’re not going to get the best coverage of your new product.  If you load your press release down with words that only your engineering staff could understand, your newspaper columnist is just going to toss your release in the trash because they never have enough time, the deadline is always looming, and they just can’t take the time to dig out what it is you really do.

If you want good press, speak plainly, return their calls quickly and give them your home phone number, your cell phone number and your email address so that it is easy for them to do any last minute fact-checking.

To read Matt’s article, go to www.dailycamera.com and look for Columnists in the Business section.  The direct link is here and you may need to do a free sign-in process with the newspaper website.  If this is your first encounter with a blog, I hope you’ll check out the rest of my blog and some of the blogs that I read on a regular basis.  I’m the CEO and co-founder of Gold Systems and I write this blog to help other entrepreneurs.  It is also a place where I can write informally about speech recognition and other technologies that I’m interested in.  Thanks for reading!

Terry

I want to do a couple of posts on the question "Why Blog?" this week.  I’ll save the list of reasons why I think the whole business about blogs and RSS is important for a post later this week, but let me start with just one experience that has made it worth it for me.

Matt Blumberg and Brad Feld both mentioned the book "The MouseDriver Chronicals" and I bought it and read it.  I really enjoyed it and asked Matt how he happened upon the book – it turns out that someone at his company had met one of the authors and recommended the book to him.  Then I wrote about the book in my blog and in the process went to the MouseDriver website and signed up for the MouseDriver Newsletter. The next thing I knew I was in an email conversation with both of the authors, John Lusk and Kyle Harrison, all because I had mentioned their book on my blog.

I have tremendous respect for authors and it was a great thrill to "meet" these guys and even be invited to meet face to face next time I’m traveling through their towns.  The web has made it so much easier to connect to companies, but I think one of the important aspects of blogs is that it makes it so much easier to connect to other people.  As the web was beginning to explode people worried that society would see personal connections decline, but my experience is just the opposite as I’m connecting with people I never would have met otherwise.

I missed this the first time around, but Jason Groshart, an engineer at Gold Systems wrote a good post on VoIP, VoiceXML/SALT, NLSR converging to make better voice applications.

We first started experimenting with VoIP (Voice over IP) in 1997, and even got a letter of intent from AT&T for $1,000,000 to invest in the spin-off company that we called Click-n-Call.  It never happened of course, but that’s another post.  We did get our product working though and got a couple of Fortune 500 companies to trial it.  I just noticed that the Internet Archive has record of our first ugly Click-n-Call webpage!  Don’t bother trying to make a call – the gateways have been gone for years.

Anyway, VoIP is real now and here to stay.  In a future post I’ll write about the lessons learned from dealing with a bleeding edge technology and a gigantic company like AT&T.

A reader named Ravi posted a comment to my post about speech recognition asking:

What are your thoughts on using VOIP to do dictation (as opposed to speaker independent, command based) recognition on the server side for an intranet deployed application? Has this been done with any success? Also, any idea on vendors with Java based server side solutions for this?

I think he’s asking a question that’s been on a lot of people’s mind, with VoIP thrown into the equation.  In our world there is a technology called "Text to Speech".  It’s the technology that you would use to get your computer to read your screen so you could listen to what I’m writing via a computer synthesized voice.  In self service telephone applications we use text to speech (TTS) to deal with situations where we can’t use a prerecorded voice.  For instance, it isn’t practical to record all the possible street addresses that might be needed in an account inquiry application.

TTS has evolved from the early days when the voice sounded like a drunken Swede to today where the quality is so good that many people can not distinguish TTS from a real human voice.  I predict that in the future, we’ll only use TTS but that is still a few years off.

Here’s where I answer Ravi‘s question.  People often turn TTS around and come up with Speech to Text.  If only it were as easy as rearranging the words.  Speaker dependant speech to text has been around for years.  Most people have heard of the Dragon product or IBM‘s ViaVoice, both of which are now available from our partner ScanSoft.  Both are very good products, but both assume that the user will spend time training the recognition engine.  Microsoft has incorporated a simpler product into Windows XP, but I don’t think they expect people to use it for heavy dictation like the ScanSoft products.

The Holy Grail though is speaker independent speech to text.  In other words, a speech recognition engine that can understand whatever you say without any prior training by the user.  After all, this works in Star Trek, it should work in real life. 

Speaker independent recognition works today on a limited basis – it’s the technology that we use to build telephone self service applications.  We just finished an application for a large Midwestern insurance company and bank.  Their customers can call up and say things like "what’s my checking account balance?" or "I want to transfer $300 from savings to checking tomorrow."  No more ugly and complicated touch-tone menus.  However, if the caller for some reason decides to say "By the way, how’s the weather where you are?" our application will have no idea how to respond.  We’re working with a very narrow domain of possible responses to our questions, and done correctly, we get a high recognition rate.

I believe that we might see decent speaker independent recognition engines with large vocabularies and high accuracy in the next five to ten years, but it isn’t practical today.  By then VoIP will be everywhere and it will be practical to distribute speech recognition throughout the network.

Next time you hear the recording "This call may be monitored for quality purposes", you just might be speaking to one of our human factors experts.  While tuning this same banking application we discovered that some people didn’t realize that they weren’t talking to a live human.  They went all the way through the call flow but would fail when they tried to make small talk with the computer.  We had to change the opening prompts to make it just a little more clear that they are in fact talking to a computer with very little information about the weather in Illinois!

(Except that I just lost my post by hitting the back button on my mouse) It was a great day to be an entrepreneur!  Every Thursday I have an operations meeting with my team where we look at lead generation, sales and projected revenue.  We also discuss any tactical issues that we need to work on together.  Today was an almost perfect meeting!  We learned that we were more profitable than we expected last year, that we had a good January and that the quarter is looking just fine.  We can always improve and there’s still work to do, but it was a good meeting.

Next I had lunch with an entrepreneur friend of mine, Mike Gellman, who founded Spiremedia.  Mike and a friend founded the company during the dot com boom to do web design.  Like about a million other guys.  And like all the others, when the bottom fell out, his business got hurt.  That’s probably an understatement.  I watched Mike stare into the abyss.  He was such an optimist that myself and others who were close to him worried that he had completely lost touch with reality.  (Pretty common in entrepreneurs) He had a great product and Spire was really more than a web designer, but man, that world was collapsing all around him. 

Even though he was struggling to keep his own business together, he drove up to Boulder one day about a year and a half ago to have lunch with me.  The bust was hurting us too and I was having a dark day.  You can’t be around Mike without having some of his energy rub of on you, and he’s one of the people who helped me keep going through a tough time.  I really appreciate it.  His business is doing great today and I have great respect for his ability to keep going, to learn from his mistakes.  He’s now a year older than I was when Jim and I started Gold Systems 14 years ago – he’s going to do great things.

Shameless plug:  Visit SpireMedia.com if you want more than just another web designer.  He’s now got a client list that looks like a Who’s Who list and his team produced the first web page using flash that I thought was worth the bits to look at.  If nothing else, you’ve got to check out his Ant Farm.  I’ve been listening to the music track while writing this and that alone is worth taking a look.  Click on some of the little people to see who helped get SpireMedia through the bust as a survivor of the dot com era.  Disclaimer: I was once on Mike’s advisory board, but except for him buying lunch today, I was never compensated and my only interest is to see a great bunch of people make it big.

At the end of my day today, I saw some people in my company "do the right thing."  We had an employee who’s since left the business who is having a tough time.  These people cut him some slack and today I saw a very nice, and very classy thank you note from him.  There have been many days this past few years where I would have much rather been anything but an entrepreneur, but today was a very good day to be an entrepreneur.

Read more

I read The MouseDriver Chronicles recently because of a review on Brad Feld’s blog about it.  I just looked it up and his title for the review was Young Jackasses of the Post-New Economy He wasn’t talking about the MouseDriver guys because these guys created a real business while a lot of their B-school buddies where creating dot coms that ultimately cratered.

I’ve referred a couple of people to this book recently.  It is one of the few books that I’ve read that talk about what it is REALLY like to start a company.  The last person I mentioned the book to asked if they are still in business, and while it appears that the product has been licensed to someone else and is still available, the company has been closed down.  The book came from the newsletters that John and Kyle sent out over the years of their business, and their website has all of them available online.  There last issue is a summary of the lessons learned and it is a good one – check it out.  As I like to say, "lessons will be repeated until learned" so it is a good list for new entrepreneurs as well as experienced entrepreneurs.  (The newsletters are now available as a pdf here)

I would disagree with them on one point in their last newsletter though.  They said they would not have quit their day job.  There’s a saying in Kentucky – "you can’t cross a creek in two steps."  Starting a company is hard enough without also having to work a day job too.  I spent a lot of time planning and thinking with my partner Jim before I gave notice, but I believe that when you are ready to go you need to do it full time.  I talk more about this in my Frequently Asked Questions post.

A few years ago I happened upon the concept of Tzedakah.  It has to do with the way we as people give to others in need.  I hope you will read it, and then help me work out how it relates to if and how corporations should give to others.

The Eight Degrees of Tzedakah

There are eight degrees of giving tzedakah (doing justice), each one higher than the last.

The lowest degree is when one gives grudgingly, reluctantly, or with regret.

A higher degree is when the donor gives less than is required by the poor person, but does so willingly.

A still higher degree is when the donor gives what is required by the poor person, but only after being solicited.

A yet higher degree is when the donor gives before being asked.

The fifth and higher degree is when the recipient knows the donor, but the donor does not know the recipient.

The next degree is when the identity of the donor is not revealed.

A higher degree of tzedakah is when both the donor and the recipient are anonymous.

The highest degree is when the donor helps the recipient become self supporting by means of a gift, a loan, or by finding employment for the one in need.

-Moses Maimonides, twelfth century Jewish philosopher

My mom taught me early in life that it is wrong to make a big deal out of helping others, and it is especially wrong to do it just to get the recognition.  I doubt if she had heard about Tzedakah, but she got the idea of it. 

So then, does this apply to corporations?  I believe corporations are a strong force in making the world a better place – they provide jobs, they bring people together into communities and ultimately they are simply groups of people working together.  But should they as an entity make charitable donations or should they leave that to their shareholders and owners?  I can see it both ways.  What do you think?  Don’t be shy, please comment.

Whether you choose to help others as an individual or through your company, I’d like to suggest one way that is as close to level eight as I can figure.  Heifer International is a non-profit organization that will take your donation and will turn it into a cow, or a pig or a goat that will go to a person in need.  That person can use the animal to support their family, and part of the deal is that they then are supposed to share the offspring of the animals with others.  It is self-sustaining and Heifer seem to do a good job of making sure most of the money they collect actually gets to the people they are trying to help.  It’s as easy to give to Heifer as it is to buy a book on amazon.com. But if you do it, don’t tell me or anyone else about it.  Do find a way to pass on the idea though.

In the United States in just a few generations we have prospered to the point where most of us have too much to eat.  There are still too many starving children around the world.  (One is too many)