Entrepreneurship is an Art not a Job « Steve Blank

Some men see things as they are and ask why.
Others dream things that never were and ask why not.
George Bernard Shaw

Over the last decade we assumed that once we found repeatable methodologies (Agile and Customer Development, Business Model Design) to build early stage ventures, entrepreneurship would become a “science,” and anyone could do it.

I’m beginning to suspect this assumption may be wrong.

Where Did We Go Wrong?
It’s not that the tools are wrong, I think the entrepreneurship management stack is correct and has made a major contribution to reducing startup failures. Where I think we have gone wrong is the belief that anyone can use these tools equally well.

Entrepreneurship is an Art not a Job
For the sake of this analogy, think of two types of artists: composers and performers (think music composer versus members of the orchestra, playwright versus actor etc.)

Founders fit the definition of a composer: they see something no one else does. And to help them create it from nothing, they surround themselves with world-class performers. This concept of creating something that few others see – and the reality distortion field necessary to recruit the team to build it – is at the heart of what startup founders do. It is a very different skill than science, engineering, or management.

 

Entrepreneurial employees are the talented performers who hear the siren song of a founder’s vision. Joining a startup while it is still searching for a business model, they too see the promise of what can be and join the founder to bring the vision to life.

Founders then put in play every skill which makes them unique – tenacity, passion, agility, rapid pivots, curiosity, learning and discovery, improvisation, ability to bring order out of chaos, resilience, leadership, a reality distortion field, and a relentless focus on execution – to lead the relentless process of refining their vision and making it a reality.

Both founders and entrepreneurial employees prefer to build something from the ground up rather than join an existing company. Like jazz musicians or improv actors, they prefer to operate in a chaotic environment with multiple unknowns. They sense the general direction they’re headed in, OK with uncertainty and surprises, using the tools at hand, along with their instinct to achieve their vision. These types of people are rare, unique and crazy. They’re artists.

Tools Do Not Make The Artist
When page-layout programs came out with the Macintosh in 1984, everyone thought it was going to be the end of graphic artists and designers. “Now everyone can do design,” was the mantra. Users quickly learned how hard it was do design well (yes. it is an art) and again hired professionals. The same thing happened with the first bit-mapped word processors. We didn’t get more or better authors. Instead we ended up with poorly written documents that looked like ransom notes. Today’s equivalent is Apple’s “Garageband”. Not everyone who uses composition tools can actually write music that anyone wants to listen to.

“Well If it’s Not the Tools Then it Must Be…”
The argument goes, “Well if it’s not tools then it must be…” But examples from teaching other creative arts are not promising. Music composition has been around since the dawn of civilization yet even today the argument of what “makes” a great composer is still unsettled. Is it the process (the compositional strategies used in the compositional process?) Is it the person (achievement, musical aptitude, informal musical experiences, formal musical experiences, music self-esteem, academic grades, IQ, and gender?)  Is it the environment (parents, teachers, friends, siblings, school, society, or cultural values?) Or is it constant practice (apprenticeship, 10,000 hours of practice?)

It may be we can increase the number of founders and entrepreneurial employees, with better tools, more money, and greater education. But it’s more likely that until we truly understand how to teach creativity, their numbers are limited.

Lessons Learned

• Founders fit the definition of an artist: they see – and create– something that no one else does
• To help them move their vision to reality, they surround themselves with world-class performers
• Founders and entrepreneurial employees prefer operating in a chaotic environment with multiple unknowns
• These type of people are rare, unique and crazy
• Not everyone is an artist

via steveblank.com

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Richard Branson on Embracing Change, Competition, & Obsolesence

In business, change sometimes happens more quickly than you want it to – transformative technologies arrive suddenly and economies shift. Telling your staff to embrace change and get creative is all well and good, but that will not address their (or your) underlying anxieties. The reality is that change is usually a threat – one that has the potential to bring your business to a halt.

Given Virgin's long experience in the music industry, I often receive questions from readers about the industry's future. How can anyone successfully launch a business in this sector when transformative change is stressing even the nimblest players?

Our experience shows there is always opportunity in times of change. The pundits who have predicted the end of the industry should remember the last time it was in meltdown: 1982. The economic recession was having a deep impact. Many people were home-taping off the radio or from a friend's LP – a forerunner to illegal downloading.

At the time, Virgin Retail had over 100 record stores across the U.K. On weekdays they were deserted. Then we learned that the CD was about to take the market by storm.

The new format's advantages were immediately obvious. It was much smaller than the LP, and there was no wear, distortion or surface noise. My notebooks from that period are full of questions about the potential impact on our business. I wrote: "What happens to the record collection around the country – do people replace their vinyl with CDs?"

At first the only way for us to survive was to start clearing the decks for the new stocks and discounting our LPs. We succeeded in switching our business over to CDs, which not all competitors did.

We could also see the dawn of another retailing phenomenon. Two years after the introduction of the personal computer in 1980, there were already nearly 500,000 video-game machines in use in the U.K. Soon, selling games and then films became a worthwhile sideline for our stores.

By 1986, even Virgin Megastores was under threat. Our biggest rival, HMV, was going after us by opening giant stores, some near our flagship locations. Undeterred, we launched our Dublin store, then the biggest in the world, at Aston's Quay. That store not only stocked specialist classical and jazz, folk and rock music, but also sold music videos, games and computer software. This was where I could see the future of our business.

And we gave the old-fashioned retailers, such as Woolworths, Dixons and Currys, a run for their money. Our shop windows and store interiors were dynamic and exciting. We brought in bands to perform and play a few songs. These events brought more sales and better publicity.

So, despite -- and because of --the disruptive change that had just taken place, we transformed our business model and did very well in the '80s and '90s. 

Did all this work make us future-proof? Of course not. Even from the start, our smaller Virgin Records shops made little money. The stores kept our youthful, irreverent brand in the public eye, but they were unsustainable in the long run. One of my biggest business mistakes – indeed, regrets – was not selling all of our stores sooner. Closing the book on Virgin Records in 1992, with the sale to EMI, was painful, but the best decision.

Today, is digital downloading killing music? The economics of music production are far healthier now than they ever were in Virgin's heyday as a music company. When we built our recording studio, it was a massive, expensive undertaking. Virgin Records' job was to bankroll recording sessions for musicians – and take the risks. To make money, we had to sell a lot of albums.

Now a top-quality album can be made on a laptop, and then you can send the file over the Internet to anyone, almost anywhere. Promotion is as easy as setting up a page on MySpace, Facebook or another social networking site. Economies of scale don't matter anymore to young musicians, although they still matter a great deal to the record companies and their shareholders.

I do think that record companies will survive, but they will have to be much leaner – and in business, small is beautiful. Those smaller companies will have to discover genuine talent, which is the reason many people who are passionate about music choose careers in the industry. And with all that energy and zeal, there's no telling what some entrepreneurs will achieve next.

This is an edited excerpt from Richard Branson's book Business Stripped Bare: Adventures of a Global Entrepreneur (Virgin Books, 2010).

via entrepreneur.com

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Jocelyn K. Glei: Why Entrepreneurial Thinking Is For Everyone Now : The 99 Percent

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"We need a new playbook," says entrepreneur and author Ben Casnocha. "The world has changed. The world of work has changed. Many of the assumptions that have guided how we think about careers in America are no longer true."

The Start-Up of You, written by Casnocha and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, is that playbook. It argues that we can no longer expect to find a job, instead we must make our jobs. As Hoffman says, we have to "find a way to add value in a way no one else can. For entrepreneurs, it's differentiate or die — that now goes for all of us."*

Relevant for recent grads to mid-career professionals in the midst of a transition, Start-Up provides pragmatic, actionable advice, finishing each chapter with tasks to complete in the next day, in the next week, and in the next month.

I chatted with Casnocha — a longtime favorite blogger of mine — after reading Start-Up to explore the book's themes in more depth and investigate his collaborative process with Reid.

What role does passion play in a good career plan — if any?

Definitely plays a role. When you're passionate about something, you tend to do better work, longer. The question is whether you find passion or develop it through competence. And then how you square passion with other considerations — such as your aspirations and the market realities. So, passion is key, yes, but it's rather more complicated than many career writers would have you think. Passion without being good at it doesn't get you very far; passion that no one will pay money for is also limited in scope. You need to weigh various factors, passion being one of them.

 

Do you think there's something new about "entrepreneurial thinking"? Or is it the new word for a type of thinking that has always existed?

All humans were born with entrepreneurial instincts. We quote Muhammad Yunus to this effect — he said that for a very long time humans forged lives by finding food, feeding ourselves. The instinct to create a life is deep within us. What's new are the specific skills that complement that instinct — the skills for adapting in the modern world.

What do you think is the No.1 misconception of people heading into a new career or looking to make a job transition?

That if you simply work hard, good things will happen. It certainly increases the odds, but working hard is no guarantee of anything. There are no guarantees, period.

The question is whether you find passion or develop it through competence.

How important is being comfortable with uncertainty? 

Anything worth doing is going to have degrees of uncertainty associated with it. Clamming up and treating any uncertainty as "risk" to be avoided will preclude you from seizing the very best opportunities. So, it's important. How you actually go about embracing risk and uncertainty is something we detail in the book. One tip: induce risk in small chunks, bit by bit, to raise your tolerance.

I love the idea that you present in the book of an "interesting people fund" — where you encourage people to set aside time and money in advance to keep their networks up to date. Can you talk a little bit about this "long view" approach to networking?

The interesting people fund is a pre-commitment strategy: by pre-committing time and money to meeting interesting people, you increase the likelihood that you actually do it. Because many people know they ought to do it, and think about doing it, but when push comes to shove and it's time to take an hour out of your day or spend $40 buying someone lunch — they punt on it.

In terms of the long view of networks, if you're not taking the long view, you're doing it wrong. Relationships — be it romantic, friendship, or professional – take time to develop. A lot of time. Rushing a relationship into a short term transaction can jeopardize the long-term relationship potential.

I recently read a great quote from Steve Pavlina: "If you struggle financially, upgrade your social skills. Money flows through people." Does this resonate with you?

Absolutely. In the opportunities chapter we say that every opportunity is attached to a person. Opportunities do not float like clouds in the sky. They're attached to people. If you're looking for an opportunity — including one that has a financial payoff — you're really looking for a person.

Opportunities do not float like clouds in the sky. They're attached to people.

 

If I had to distill the advice in the book down to the simplest possible equation: It might be something like "constant curiosity + action = career success." Is that accurate? What would be your equation?

Gosh, hard question! "Constant curiosity + thoughtful action = career success" could be one. "Change + adaptability = success" could be another. Networks should also be in there somehow!

What was your writing process with Reid like?

I'll be writing about this more on my personal blog in a bit. But the short answer is that we focused on our comparative advantages. I was working on it full-time and could go deep on some of the ideas and how we should organize them. Reid thought a lot about which ideas from the start-up/entrepreneurship world could be mapped effectively to careers. As with all books, we went through a lot of iterations to get it right. Anne Lamott nailed it: "Shitty first drafts." I will say that writing a book forces a certain rigor on the ideas — the linear text limits you but in a way that ultimately sharpens the ideas, I think. Certainly that was the case for us.

--
Jocelyn K. Glei is the Editor-in-Chief of the 99%. You can follow her intermittent tweets @jkglei. via the99percent.com

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Jim Woods is president and founder of InnoThink Group. A global management consulting firms specialized solely in helping organizations of all sizes in all industries catalyzing top line growth through strategic innovation and hypercompetition. Jim has over 25 years consulting experience in working with small, mid size and Fortune 1000 companies. He is a former U.S. Navy Seabee and grandfather of five. To arrange for Jim to speak at your next event or devise an effective growth strategy email or call us at 719-649-4118 for availability.james@innothinkgroup.com

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