Category Archives: Reflections

The Business Lesson on the Stairway to Heaven

Advice, Entrepreneurship, Reflections, Work Life Balance,

What’s “the stairway to heaven” to you? Is it about God and Heaven? A metaphor for business growth, maybe? I think of the Led Zeppelin song and a picture on the album cover something like the one here. It’s a long stairway heading up into the sky, with landings or stopping points, and changes of directions.  Which is a lot like business, at least business in the front lines of startups and entrepreneurship.

Business is a lot of climbing. Even as an entrepreneur, doing something you supposedly like, it’s still a lot of struggle. It’s late nights and early mornings and spreadsheets and presentations and airports and hotels. It’s worries about cash and hiring and firing, making do when you have to, and building something better whenever you can. That’s the stairway. We hope it’s going up.

The landings are pauses. You stop the climbing. You look around. You check the landscape, taking a fresh look. What’s changed while you were concentrating on taking those specific steps? Are you still moving up? Are there new options?

Are you still okay with your planning? Or does your plan need to change? Are you still moving in the planned direction, towards the planned objectives? If not, why not? And what do you do about it?

And don’t forget to ask whether you are still enjoying it. Is it still what you wanted to be doing with your life? Is it blocking the view of more important things (like people), or, we would hope, helping you help them and relate to them. Have you forgotten everything except the damned stairs?

When I was young, backpacking in the High Sierra, straining under the weight of the pack, struggling up a long uphill stretch at 10,000 feet altitude, I would occasionally stop, relax, breathe, and consciously enjoy the beautiful view of the mountains around me. I would forget the struggle of walking up hill with a pack and remember why I was there. The mountains made me happy. They were beautiful.

Do yourself a favor. Pause. Take it all in. Reorient yourself and your business. Take a fresh look.

(Image credit: Saiva_l/Shutterstock)

What Does Creativity Have to Do With Business?

Creativity, Reflections, Technology, Web/Tech, , , ,

What does creativity have to do with business? Business is about dollars and deadlines and suits, while creativity is about nerds and long hair and artsy-fartsy. Or is it?

As the digital technology revolution matures, it is becoming more about creativity and less about engineering.

That’s quoting Fred Wilson, venture capitalist and thought leader, in The Creative Phase last Saturday on his excellent A VC blog. This seems important to me:

Why the distinction between engineering and creativity? Can’t engineers be creative. Of course they can and are. Maybe there is a better word to use. But what I am trying to delineate between is the hard work of designing and building systems and the more abstract efforts to entertain, educate, and emote with these systems.

Looking over New York’s technology scene, he quotes an analysis that notes that New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), a two-year graduate program in technology, is part of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, not the corresponding school of engineering, much less business.

Was it accidental or intentional the ITP was located in an arts school? I don’t know. I should find out. But regardless of why it was done that way, the result has been impactful. ITP churns out talented people who are half engineer, half artist. And the things they build reflect that view of the world.

Of course generalizations are dangerous, Success isn’t creativity vs. engineering; it’s different for every case. There’s also showing up, luck, hard work, and of course marketing and so many other factors. But I think it’s important to jar our assumptions a bit. Fred Wilson’s nod to “abstract efforts to entertain, educate, and emote”  reminds me on my favorite quote about software, from Stuart Alsop: “Good software feels like silk. You know it when you see it.”

And this all reminds me that some serious portion of what we now call the great works of art – all of Shakespeare’s plays, for example – were created by people who were doing it for the money.  It wasn’t the business of art, it was that good art was good business.

I think about some of my favorite tech products: software I use, websites … isn’t Google Earth, for example, more art than engineering? The original Macintosh? Even – and you’ll have to forgive me for this one, but I do love spreadsheets – the first VisiCalc?

An Older Entrepreneur’s 10 Takeaways from the Facebook Movie

Current Affairs, Reflections, Social media, , ,

I saw The Social Network last Friday night, and enjoyed it thoroughly. When it was over I was surprised. “What? Two hours already?”

Here are 10 (mental) notes I took as I watched:

  1. This movie is fun. Aaron Sorkin (of West Wing and Studio 60) does a great job making entertainment from reality.
  2. The plot feels real. I have no first-hand knowledge of Mark or Facebook, but I’ve done angel investing, raised VC money, and was a founding director of a software company that went public. And it feels to me like how these things happen.
  3. The Mark character rings true. He’s brilliant, obsessive, extremely productive, abrasive, selfish, and driven. I’ve known some people like that. They get things done. They bump people around on the way, more from blind obsession with their goals than on purpose. They’re not real good at seeing two sides of any question. They build empires.
  4. Ideas have little or no value. Implementation is what matters. Facebook grew out of some similar ideas that others had first. Mark took them and made them Facebook, and those others didn’t.  When reminded that others had a similar idea first, the Mark character points out that if it had been left to them, it would never have grown into what Facebook became. I agree. The race goes not to the alleged originator of the idea, but to the person who took that idea and built a business out of it.
  5. This movie is not bad for Facebook or for Mark Zuckerberg. We should all be so lucky. What happened with Facebook is a one-of-a-kind business phenomenon and this movie reinforces that. And the Mark character isn’t bad guy or good guy, he’s techie nerd obsessed business founder. It won’t hurt him at all. Mark can cry all the way to the bank. I like Ben Parr’s Mashable post on the real Mark Zuckerberg’s feelings about the movie after it rolled out. And I like this NYTimes.com analysis (you may have to register to see it, but registration’s free) of Facebook’s lack of legal options to do anything but watch.
  6. I don’t feel sorry for the three guys who came up with the original idea. The idea was obvious. They didn’t implement it. Mark stalled them with misinformation, which isn’t nice, but then ideas aren’t owned, so they can’t be stolen; just implemented.  (Corollary to note #4)
  7. The guy who wrote checks has a better argument. There are at least two sides to his story, and I doubt that the movie tells his side very well.   It doesn’t add up right. I do believe that writing checks into a business early on gives you some real ownership.
  8. Always get it in writing. There’s a lesson for entrepreneurs everywhere: sure it’s awkward among friends, but even if it’s not a legal document write it down and sign it. Maybe it’s just a reminder for you and partners later. Maybe you keep it in terms you understand. Ideally, you work with a lawyer to make it legal. It’s very important to do this early, before success or failure, because that keeps motivations cleaner.
  9. You have to protect yourself, not trust in friendship, good will, or ethics. Good intentions and verbal promises get lost in the shuffle. Business is like that. Never trust what somebody tells you a legal document says; read it. When somebody else is working with an attorney, get an attorney.
  10. The real world is full of great stories. It doesn’t take a space fantasy or super hero to make a great movie plot. Real people, the real world, and even real business can be very entertaining. And hey, if we get a few lessons along the way, everybody wins. Right?

For the record, the notes here were mental notes only. I didn’t get my phone out and type into it during the movie. So movie goers, don’t worry. That wasn’t me.

No TV, No Internet, The Crisis That Wasn’t

Reflections, ,

What a strange moment.  The car, the music, and suddenly, in the midst of unwarranted stress, an unexpected peace. Sort of like the right mellow music at just the right time. When the mood changes all at once.

I was driving home from the office at night. I’d been home for dinner, but gone back to the office for a while after dinner. The car drove smoothly over a newly paved street under soft street lights highlighting shade trees in the darkening dusk of late summer or early fall.

Hours earlier, a truck ran over and knocked out our Internet and our television. “Our” in this case means most of the Willamette Valley, from Eugene north about 100 miles to Portland. A fiber optic cable trunk line was cut by a dump truck, or something like that.

What to do? First, the shortness of breath, the shudder at contemplating hours without web or TV. It took effort not to panic. I went to the office, finished up some things pending before leaving for California later this morning.

And then, later, that moment of realization when things came together correctly: the car, the trees, the darkening sky, the music.

Then I realized, with a long peaceful exhale, enjoying the heat of the evening, the people playing on the streets, the truth of the crisis that wasn’t. We have books. We have movies, on DVD and on our iPads. And we even have email on the iPad, and on our phones.We have books and magazines. We have each other. We’d be fine.

We could even talk to each other.

And so we were fine. Comcast was restored before midnight. We were asleep when it came back. Peacefully.

(Image: Aleksi Markku/Shutterstock)

Angry Emails Are Not Biodegradable

Advice, Reflections

Never argue in email or txt messages.

Sure, you think you can make your point that way, clearly, without interruptions, going just one way. It feels something like the advantages of guerrilla warfare: get in quickly, deliver your carefully targeted blow, and then disappear. Fire

But it doesn’t work. You don’t make that point. Instead, you inflame the argument with more incendiary textual sound and fury, without inflection to make it human. You make it worse.

Email works beautifully for many kinds of simple, practical communication. But it’s not personal and it doesn’t work for personal arguments.

Talk about it. Walk across the hall or get on the phone. You’ll be glad you did.

10 Blogging Tips. My 1,000th Post on This Blog

Advice, Blogs and blogging, Reflections, , , , , , , , ,

Last night I was halfway through a draft post patting myself on the back, illustrated with champagne glasses, when my youngest daughter, Megan, called from San Francisco, where she lives now. That’s @MeganBerry to you, blogger and social media expert,  marketing manager of Klout.com. So I asked her this: “What do I do with my 1,000th post?”

stacked stones“Do something that matters,” Megan answered. “Do something special.”  She talked about favorites, lessons, advice, and reflections.

So, about 12 hours later, this is it, number 1,000. Gulp.

I started in 2006, but did only a dozen posts in the first year. I really started in April 2007, with reflections on family business, a personal note about passing the torch to a second generation. I changed jobs then – my choice – from owner-entrepreneur-president to blogger president of Palo Alto Software.

My personal favorite posts are on the sidebar here to the right. My favorite search is the one for fundamentals, particularly the series of 5 posts on planning fundamentals. My favorite categories come straight from the blog title: planning, startups, and stories: that’s specifically the categories planning fundamentals, true stories, and starting a business. And I also really like advice, reflections, and business mistakes. But I like most of my posts here. You kind of have to, to keep doing it.

Here are 10 blogging lessons I’ve learned:

  1. Imitation isn’t just flattery, it’s learning. When I said I wasn’t a blogger, Sabrina Parsons said “you will be. Just start reading blogs.” So I did. And I imitate a lot of other bloggers I like to read. So many that I can’t name them all here; but my thanks to Guy, John, Pam, Anita, Ann, Steve, Seth, Matthew, Ramon, and so many others. Every blog on my blogroll here to the right.
  2. Titles make a huge difference. That’s not just blogging. It’s been true for a long time. My daughter Andrea Breanna, CTO at Huffington Post, teamed up with his younger sister Megan to teach me titles. And Ironically, what they taught me was a lot of what I learned at UPI plus the power of questions, and lists of 5 and 10.
  3. Short and simple: short sentences, short posts. Short thoughts? I like one-word sentences, and one-sentence paragraphs. And short posts, in theory: despite how much I admire Seth Godin’s short posts, I try, and usually fail.
  4. Break grammar rules. Carefully. Rarely. Like right here. There’s no verb in either of the previous two sentences, so this post would have gotten me an F in Brother Salvatore’s 12th grade English class. 30-some years later, I’m glad he gave me that F on a 10-page paper for using “it’s” instead of “its” once. That lesson was worth it. But jeez!
  5. Pictures add meaning. Thanks to John Jantsch for that one. And to Shutterstock for supplying me with the bulk of the pictures I’ve used on this blog for the last year. And don’t ask me to explain the illustration on this one. I didn’t want champagne glasses or cakes and candles.
  6. Write Often, and keep writing. Find your pace. Honor consistency. Once a month doesn’t feel like a blog, but three good posts weekly is better than two good and three not so good. Break your routine occasionally for mental health. I write a lot and like it.  I’ve done 1,000 posts here in three years. Plus 700 on Up and Running, and another 200 or so on Small Business Trends, Huffington Post, Amex Open, Industry Word, and Planning Demystified. Plus some guest posts on others. It’s easier to maintain momentum than overcome inertia.
  7. Love the comments. Thank you. Not you spammers. But even you critics with annoying comments. Especially you critics with smart well written disagreements. Not the dumb generic praise intended only for your own SEO benefit, which I delete.  But I love the comments, they make it live.
  8. Love Twitter. Twitter has done wonders for my blogging, my daily work flow, and my growing satisfaction with web 2.0 or social media or whatever you call it. If you don’t get twitter, it’s not clutter, it’s not what they had for lunch, it’s blog posts and links and what’s going on in the world, as shared by people you like, now. My 18-point Twitter Primer feels as valid today as when I posted it.
  9. Tell the damn truth. You can’t fake it for long. Keeping track of all your various personae is exhausting. Write as yourself, or maybe (just maybe) who you really want to be. I know this is a lame old quote, but I heard it first from Chris Guilleabeau and I like it: “I have to be myself. All the other people are already taken.”
  10. Tell don’t sell. Lots of us blog for business. Much as I sincerely love the books and software I’ve done, I don’t blog about them here. Sure, the sidebar sells, I hope, but my posts don’t.

Here’s advice, in honor of this being post number 1,000:

  1. Anything anybody can believe is an image of truth (paraphrasing William Blake).
  2. Time is the scarcest resource. Time, not money.
  3. Your relationships with the people you love are WAY more important than proving that you were right.

Dear reader: thank you.

(image credit: Arsgera/Shutterstock)

On the Value of Good Computer Games

Reflections, Technology, Work Life Balance, , , ,

My thanks to Chris Brogan for posting Games and Fun on his blog this morning, linking to Jane McGonical’s Gaming Can Make a Better World video on TED.com (embedded below).

In his post, Chris says:

Forget the rest of my blog post and just watch this. Ask yourself whether or not you could make more fun and more games out of what we all do for a living.

http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf

Which reminds me that I think some kinds of games are great teachers. I’m very grateful that I spent a lot of time as a kid playing strategy games, particularly the Avalon-Hill strategy games that took hours and involved lots of cardboard pieces on maps. I played that one forward with my own kids, in a sense, by spending time with them on computer strategy games, most notably Age of Empires. I think a good game is a powerful lesson. Especially when it’s fun.

I should add, though, that I’m talking here about good games. The strategy games teach. And a lot of other types of games are quietly teaching while doing. Think of the word games, puzzle games, role playing games. Take a look at Civilization, the game.

And I have to add that I’m definitely not saying all computer games are good for anybody. Obviously. There are a lot of computer games out there that are mind numbing or (think shoot-em-up) worse. In my opinion.

It’s Not the Technology That Makes You Dumb. It’s What You Do With Your Time and Attention.

Advice, Management, Personal Productivity, Reflections, ,

Yesterday I posted WSJ vs. NYTimes on How Dumb You Are or Aren’t on Huffington Post, tracking conflicting opinions on whether technology makes us all smarter or dumber. Smarter because it’s a lot of print, creativity, and intellectual work; dumber because of multitasking, distractions, shorter attention spans.

I find the debate interesting, but I go with the commenter to that post who summarized:

Seems to me that the Internet can do both. It probably depends on the person…

Amen to that. Don’t confuse tools with how they’re used. I think we all have that friend who’s petting the phone, reading email and doing instant messages while pretending to listen, and we’re all guilty of that sometimes (well, I am). But we also have that other friend who’s now writing seriously on their blog, taking up haiku via Twitter, and reading and writing like never before.

I grew up without all this. I was in my 30s before there was email, in my 40s before I got a cell phone, in my 50s when the dot-com world crashed, and in my 60s when I fell in love with Twitter. Back in that distant past, we still had endless choices of distractions and amusements vs. thinking and working. We still made choices. We still had to choose between staying late at the office, getting things done, or not. There were a lot of good business reasons not to take vacations. Today I find myself turning away from the computer at times, while talking on the phone, to focus on the conversation, without the IM interrupting me. And I find myself not doing that, wandering out of the conversation and looking at email, turning dumb.

The power of it all, these days, the instantaneous communication or whatever you want to call it, it’s just plain amazing. I love it. And yes, I misuse it all the time, just like you do.

But in the end, today as in the 1960s, what you value, who you are, and what and who you care about is a matter of how you spend your time. It’s a matter of focusing attention. You aim attention, or fail to; it doesn’t just happen.

And attention is time, and time is the scarcest resource.

(Image: HomeStudio/Shutterstock)

Our Children Spread Their Dreams Under Our Feet. We Should Tread Softly.

Creativity, Current Affairs, Reflections, , , ,

This less-than-17-minute talk was posted on the TED ideas worth spreading site just a week or so ago. I think every one of us should take 17 minutes off and listen to this, and think about it. It’s funny. It’s interesting. And it’s important.

Sir Ken Robinson starts with a reference to global climate change, a big problem, hard to embrace because there’s so little any individual can do. He jumps to a global education crisis, which strikes me as just as big, and just as hard to embrace. That’s sad. I hope I’m wrong. He implies, at least, that we might be able to change this for the better. I hope he’s right.

http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf

Some interesting quotes:

  • A three-year old is not half a six-year old.
  • We have built our education system on the model of fast food.
  • If you’re doing something you love, an hour feels like five minutes. If you’re doing something that doesn’t resonate with your spirit, five minutes feels like an hour.
  • The reason so many people are opting out of education is because it doesn’t feed their spirit. It doesn’t feed their energy or their passion.
  • We have to change metaphors. We have to go from an industrial model of education, a manufacturing model, which is based on linearity and conformity and batching people, to a model based more on principals of agriculture. Human flourishing is not a mechanical process, it’s an organic process.

I love his ending. He finishes quoting a William B. Yeats poem, which ends: “Tread softly, because you tread on my dreams.”

And he (the speaker, not the poet) concludes:

And every day, everywhere, our children spread their dreams under our feet. And we should tread softly.

5 Business Fundamentals I Learned the Hard Way

Business Mistakes, Reflections, ,

Two days ago I had the pleasure of being interviewed by John Caddell, founder of the Mistake Bank, for a podcast focusing on mistakes. That made me think about some of the things I learned that came from the business mistakes I’ve made. This is over the more than 27 years since I was last an employee, and 22 years of running my (well, our) own business. And despite a fancy business degree.

1. Your employees can’t also be your friends.

Most business owners want to treat employees like friends. We hire people we think we like, we work with them, we share values, so it’s only natural. But I’ve found, I’m afraid, that it doesn’t work.

Sometimes friends become employees, and sometimes former employees become friends, but don’t kid yourself. People you pay aren’t really friends. And business requires management, which means goals and tracking and accountability and feedback, which, ultimately, means you aren’t equal. You can’t be both equal and effective.

As a test, ask yourself: when those people you thought were friends leave the company, are they still friends?

This was really hard on me because I brought my anti-establishment quasi-hippie former ’60s persona with me into my business. I’m not naturally comfortable with hierarchy. But in a real business, it has to be there. I learned this the hard way.

2. Profits aren’t cash.

Profits are just an accounting concept. You get them by adding up the sales you make over a specified time and subtracting the costs and expenses. But having the sale doesn’t mean you have the money; and the cost associated with that sale might be something you paid months earlier. And furthermore, the money you spend to repay debt or buy assets is completely ignored by profits.

So it’s not hard to go broke while still being profitable. I learned that in business school first but then had to relearn it 15 years later when my company suddenly doubled sales and profits, but it nearly killed us. We were selling through channels, so money from sales came five months later, but we were building inventory and spending on marketing months in advance. So we were spending in October for sales made the following March that generated deposits into the bank in the next July. We nearly went under during our first big growth spurt. So I learned about cash flow the hard way.

3. Good liars are rare but dangerous.

Most liars are obvious and easy to spot, but last week I was chatting with an investor whose firm got into trouble for not catching a problem before they invested. He felt bad. It looked like their “due diligence” process failed. But he said:

“If you think about it, we rarely run across a person who can look you straight in the eye and lie through their teeth without showing it. We’re not equipped for that. When people answer straight direct questions with straight direct lies, they can get away with it.”

That made me think. Lots of people tell lies at odd moments, make excuses, try to squeeze out of things; but with normal people, that kind of behavior trips them up on a regular basis. But the power of the person who lies very well is something else altogether. That’s another one I learned the hard way.

4. You have to live with mistakes.

If you can’t stand mistakes, don’t make them, and don’t tolerate them, then you’re not cut out to have your own business. You are going to make mistakes, you can count on it. You have to be quick and flexible about recognizing mistakes, acknowledging them, and taking whatever steps need to follow them.

In Robert Sutton’s 12 Things Good Bosses Believe, posted last Friday at the Harvard Business Review, he says:

One of the best tests of my leadership — and my organization — is “what happens after people make a mistake?”

I agree. I had to learn that the hard way.

5. You can’t do everything, so at least try do the right things.

I call it displacement: everything you do rules out something else that you can’t do. Every entrepreneur wants to build every possible product to please every possible customer. I do an you do too. But we don’t realize, or at least I certainly didn’t for a long time, that trying to do everything doesn’t work. You end up not doing the really important things as well as you should, getting things only half done.

You try to focus. Take a step back out of the chaos, clear your head, and revisit priorities. What really matters? No matter what brilliant ideas you may or may not call your strategy, your real strategy is how you spend your time and your money. I learned that the hard way.