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Generate your custom burndown chart fast and easy

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10 questions to ask your crazyfuckerself 

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10 questions to ask your crazyfuckerself 

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10 questions to ask your crazyfuckerself

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Why teaching entrepreneurship students "idea generation" skills is so hard, and what to do about it. More at www.TeachingEntrepreneurship.org

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Arthur Tolsma

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bol.com | Startups en downs, Arthur Tolsma | 9789081854740 | Boeken

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Startups en downs (paperback). Ik lig op bed. Twintig minuten geleden neergeploft en nog steeds het hoofd in mijn kussen verborgen, hoewel mijn nek al pijn doet. Maar er is iets wat nog veel meer pijn doet: mijn ego. Vier maanden eerder voelde ik me nog de koning van de wereld.

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R. Hendriks

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bol.com | I'm hungry, Ruud Hendriks | 9789461561091 | Boeken

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I'm hungry (hardcover). Klopt mijn business model? Hoe vind ik investeerders?Hoe verbeter ik mijn productie? Hoe financier ik verdere groei? Waar moet ik op letten bij het aannemen van nieuwe medewerkers? Welke strategische keuzes maak ik? In korte praktische hoofdstukken leggen de auteurs uit ho...

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Entrepreneurship is a Calling - 2 Minutes to See Why

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Welcome to my YouTube Channel Video clips explaining Customer Development, the Lean Startup and the Secret History of Silicon Valley My blog: https://steveblank.com My Twitter feed: https://twitter.com/sgblank

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Customer vs Product Development - How to Build a Startup

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De kleurentheorie (ontwikkeld door prof dr. Léon de Caluwé en dr. Hans Vermaak) is handzaam bij het kiezen van de kansrijkste veranderaanpak voor een bepaald probleem in een zekere organisatie. En het maakt het gemakkelijker over veranderingen met elkaar te communiceren. Het helpt de eigen eenzijdigheid én die van gesprekspartners te onderkennen en typeren.

Wilt u meer weten over uw eigen veranderkleur? Doe dan zelf de kleurentest.

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Kleurentest; snel en effectief veranderen

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De kleurentheorie (ontwikkeld door prof dr. Léon de Caluwé en dr. Hans Vermaak) is handzaam bij het kiezen van de kansrijkste veranderaanpak voor een bepaald probleem in een zekere organisatie. En het maakt het gemakkelijker over veranderingen met elkaar te communiceren. Het helpt de eigen eenzijdigheid én die van gesprekspartners te onderkennen en typeren.

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A guideline to experiment with and pivot your startup

Originally published on the 500 Startups blog.

In 2011 we raised $2M from some of the top investors in Silicon Valley. Our startup, SocialWire (later renamed Manifest), helped online retailers instantly personalize the shopping experience when their customers signed in with Facebook. However - we soon learned that it was hard to convince the big retailers to add our product recommendations to their websites which they've been optimizing for years. We also found that not enough customers wanted to sign in with Facebook while they were shopping online to get a more personalized experience.

With most of our $2M still in the bank, and a technology that was good at matching Facebook users to the right products, we decided to pivot on the problem we were solving for the same customer and rebuild our product. Instead of generating product recommendations using Facebook - we would dynamically generate personalized product ads on Facebook. This new direction resonated with online retailers and the company was eventually acquired by Rakuten.

Searching for Product Market Fit

Finding product market fit is hard. Most companies fail while searching for it. Marc Andreessen, in his 2011 essay, introduced the term as a moment in your startup's journey where things start to work. More and more customers demand your product and you achieve sustainable growth.

Most successful companies go through several pivots to find product market fit. What makes it work is usually not one major pivot, but a series of experiments across customers, problem, product, technology and growth channels. Is there a process for entrepreneurs to experiment across these areas of their business in an efficient way?

Growth marketers already figured this out. Great growth people are not necessarily the most knowledgeable marketers - they approach marketing like scientists. They have a thesis on how their idea (e.g. new advertising channel) will lead to growth, they run the experiment, look at the data and if the experiment is successful - they make it repeatable. I strongly suggest you read this by Brian Balfour, check out this talk and spend time on growthhackers.com to understand the growth experimentation process.

But growth experimentation is the tip of the iceberg - that is your startup. How can entrepreneurs apply this process of experimentation to other areas of their business, and pivot to find product market fit?

Introducing the Pivot Pyramid

Enter the Pivot Pyramid. It is a visual guideline to help founders make changes and run experiments in different areas of their business to drive growth. As investors, this is similar to how we ask questions and evaluate your startup. As founders, you could use the same guideline to come up with ideas or pivot your startup.

Customers

Customers are the foundation of your startup. The problem you solve, the product you build, and the technology it's built with - all depends on who your customer is. You may change and pivot your customer, but when you do, you will need to re-evaluate everything above in the pyramid.

Problem

Maybe you have identified the right customer, but you are solving a problem that doesn't exist or doesn't matter that much. You can pivot here, but you'll need to re-evaluate and change your solution, tech, and growth strategy. If you have the customer and problem right - you have a market.

Solution

You've identified the problems that matter to your customers. Now you have to build a product that resonates with your customers better than existing solutions in the market. Like any other changes in the pivot pyramid, changes you make in product must target quantifiable growth.

Tech

Your technology is just a means to build your solution. Even if your product resonates well with your customers - your technology choices may be hindering your growth and retention. For instance, one of the main reasons Friendster failed as the first mainstream social network was because they couldn't keep their servers up with demand.

Growth

All changes in the pivot pyramid must lead to growth. But some experiments do not require any significant change in your product or technology. These changes reside at the top of the pivot pyramid. A great marketer should frequently experiment with new growth tactics. This is needed because most growth channels get saturated or become too expensive over time.

Famous Examples of Pivots for Each Stage

Key Takeaways from the Pivot Pyramid

Frequency of Experiments

Changes you make at the bottom of the pyramid won't be frequent. For instance, you can't change who your customer is the problem you are solving often. The pace of experimentation increases at the top of the pyramid. This is especially the case as your startup matures and you find product market fit.

Start with the customer and problem

A common mistake entrepreneurs make is that they start with their product and technology without truly understanding who their customer is. If this is broken - nothing else works. That's why you shouldn't focus too much on marketing before you nail the customer, problem and solution. First, you have make something people want. You don't want to put jet fuel in a car with a broken engine. Fix the engine first.

Pivoting below, changes everything above

The changes you make at the bottom of the pivot pyramid, will impact your decisions above. But the changes you make at the top, don't necessarily require you to change things below.

For example - if you pivot on your problem, you will need to change or re-evaluate your product, technology and marketing channels. On the other hand, if you changed your technology stack, your customers may not notice any changes in your product. Similarly, experimenting with a new marketing channel may not require any changes in product or technology.

You can't have multiple types of customers

A common mistake that kills early stage startups is focusing different types of customers at once. The changes you make at the bottom of the pivot pyramid will impact the decisions you make above like product, technology and marketing. So if you focus on more than one type of customer, you are literally building multiple startups at once. As you mature as a company and achieve product market fit - it is to have more than type of customer (e.g. SMB and Enterprise). As an early stage startup, you can't afford to do that.

Marketplaces (e.g. Uber, Airbnb) are an exception to this. Marketplaces have two types of customers from day one: Sellers and Buyers. But that's why building marketplaces is really hard.

All experiments must lead to GROWTH

One of the most important things founders can learn from growth marketers - is the scientific process for experimentation. That is also the foundation of the pivot pyramid. If you have an idea for a pivot like "testing a new marketing channel" or "implementing a referral program" (GROWTH) or "migrating your servers to AWS" (TECHNOLOGY), make sure it is closely tied to a measurable goal to help with growth. Have a thesis, run a low cost experiment, measure the results, and if it works - implement change.

What is your Pyramid?

So, what is your Pivot Pyramid? Tell us about your pivot stories and how they made an impact in your business.In the mean time, be sure to follow us if you want to hear about real examples of successful pivots from companies in the 500 Startups portfolio.

Special thanks to Dominic Coryell, Mathew Johnson, Andrea Barrica, Suan Su, Yonas Beshawred, Sahin Boydas and Carl Fritjofsson for reading drafts of this, providing feedback and suggesting edits. .

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Originally published on the 500 Startups blog. In 2011 we raised $2M from some of the top investors in Silicon Valley. Our startup, SocialWire (later renamed Manifest), helped online retailers instantly personalize the shopping experience when their customers signed in with Facebook.

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Apparently there's no such thing as work-life balance. There's just life. Some tolerate their jobs and live for the weekend (or to pay the bills). Others want to change the rules and claim the whole day as their own pursuing their own passion. Some of this last group call themselves entrepreneurs. Do they manage to get the right balance?

I hear far too many stories of startup founders living off of ramen noodles (or spaghetti hoops if you're from the UK) and sleeping on mattresses in their offices. Call me naive but I don't call that much of a life. Yes, they're passionate and driven but apparently devoid of any kind of life outside of their startup.

"But are there some things that are just not worth sacrificing?"

I accept that building a business is hard. It takes dedication, hard work and sacrifice. But are there some things that are just not worth sacrificing? You may be on a mission to change the world, but should that also mean losing part of yourself in the process? What if we end up doing bad by doing good? If our friends, family and mental health suffer in the process is it still worth doing? Some of you may say "hell yeah!". If you're one of those people stop reading now!

"a valuable sense of perspective to my day"

While I've been writing this blog post I've stopped to do the nightly ritual to get my son to bed (brush his teeth; listen to him read; kiss him goodnight). This is important to me and adds a valuable sense of perspective to my day. I could have easily not done this and got on with finishing off this post (along with the hundred other things on my to do list). But I chose not to. Don't think I'm not driven or ambitious; I'm just clear as to what is important to me. I'll only get one chance to experience my young kids growing up. I'm sure I'll get another chance to work hard to build my business.

"100% commitment to your business does not have to mean 100% of your life"

I firmly believe you need to be passionate about your startup and that it needs 100% commitment. But 100% commitment to your business does not have to mean 100% of your life. Your work is important, it puts food on the table but it is only one part of your life. There are other parts that are even more important, especially if you want to sustain any kind of momentum in your work life.

If you're like me you don't think twice about working well into your old age. And given the current state of the world's financial system we probably all will. However, I think this way because I want my work to compliment my life. That means my work is part of my life and therefore something I should believe in and a be passionate about. But if I still want to be in any state to work well into my 80s then I've got make sure I look after all parts of my life now.

Sure there will be times when I'll miss my daughter's ballet recital (the wife isn't too sure about that one) or I'll find myself working well into the early hours. But the trick is to recognise that these are exceptions and not the norm. Our lives are always in a state of dynamic equilibrium and we're never truly in exact balance. Sometimes we'll work too much and sometimes we'll be spending too much time enjoying ourselves. However, if we make sure we pay attention to all parts of our lives, we'll never stray too far from the middle ground.

"remember that we deal and work with human beings"

As well as recognising this in ourselves, we also need to recognise this in others, be they colleagues or employees. We need to remember that we deal and work with human beings, not assets that need their outputs maximised. Some of us want to build successful lives as well as successful businesses. If you're like me and want to be a Happy Entrepreneur then here are 30 tenets to live by:

1. Have a vision and be clear about what you want to achieve

2. Have strong opinions that are weakly held

3. Remember that life isn't a dress rehearsal

4. Know your purpose

5. Change what you can. Accept what you can't

6. Let your passion shine through

7. Live your values

8. Be honest with yourself

9. Act with integrity

10. Become a story teller

11. Stay focused

12. Be disciplined

13. Learn to say no

14. Be effective not just efficient

15. Avoid analysis paralysis

16. If in doubt, just do it

17. Accept your failures and celebrate your successes

18. Avoid regrets

19. Don't be driven by your ego

20. Always thirst for learning

21. Listen before you speak

22. Always sleep on big decisions

23. Accept the advice of others but learn to trust your gut

24. Practice mindfulness and live in the present

25. Enjoy the journey. Don't obsess over the destination

26. Make time for friends and family

27. Make time for play

28. Make time for your health

29. What YOU achieve is far more important than what others have

30. Give more than you get but earn more than you spend

Have you considered becoming an entrepreneur? Do you think you've got an idea worth building into a business. I can't promise you that you'll discover the magical formula for finding work-life balance but be a part of our Happy Startup Home School and you'll join 99 other entrepreneurs on the first steps to building businesses with real purpose.

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There is no such thing as work-life balance - Carlos Saba - Medium

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Apparently there's no such thing as work-life balance. There's just life. Some tolerate their jobs and live for the weekend (or to pay the bills). Others want to change the rules and claim the whole day as their own pursuing their own passion. Some of this last group call themselves entrepreneurs.

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We leven in een geweldige tijd. Een tijd waarin iedereen bij kan dragen aan een andere economie. Groener. Menselijker. Innovatiever. Wat je elke dag doet maakt verschil. Wat je wel of niet koopt. Hoe je werkt. Hoe je reist. Al die handelingen samen zorgen voor de grote, de echte verandering.

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David Hieatt, co-founder of The Do Lectures and Howies, talks about his latest venture Huit Denim Co., a jeans company based in Cardigan, Wales. David explores the power of story and brands, the value of master craftsmen, and how work allied to true purpose is worth fighting for.

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Capture Your Business Model in 20 Minutes - Lean Canvas

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What If Money Was No Object? - Alan Watts

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Steve Blank

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Learn what it takes to build a successful startup using the Customer Development process, where entrepreneurs "get out of the building" to gather and iterate on feedback.

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Quality is one of the greatest things in life, but it's ephemeral and hard to define. In a similar way to how "acts of love" make better people, quality functions make better products.

In my previous post, I spoke about The Forgotten First Principle of Software Delivery: Quality. I promised to explain more about how to measure and define Quality, but to do so, we need to also consider Value, because there is an intrinsic relationship between Quality, Value and... Love! Allow me to explain.

Quality Is Like Love

When you love someone or something, you invest your time and energy to express that love. You care about their wellbeing and their condition. When applied throughout a child's life, the love manifests itself in the child being balanced and secure. For a car to be admired as a "classic" 70 years after it leaves the factory, it needs to have had love applied throughout its life, from the designer to the owner.

Quality is exactly the same. When due care and attention is applied throughout, the quality of the resulting outcomes can be both measured in tangible ways, and felt in emotional ways.

High quality comes from care and attention.

Applying Quality To Value

Let's look at how this works in product development. Consider the following coarse-grained stages of value creation:

Value creation always begins as an idea that you realize through an iterative series of steps. At every single stage in this process, you are assuming that your idea and its implementation are valuable. This is assumed value. When a consumer receives value from your realized idea, then and only then, is your idea truly valuable. This is when assumed value becomes real value.

Quality Functions

The way in which assumed value is transformed into real value is through quality functions. I briefly introduced the idea of quality functions in my previous post and said that " quality functions are the methods and practices that are essential for the continued delivery of value." Perhaps a simpler way of thinking about them is that:

Quality Functions are acts of love, care and attention that you apply throughout a product's life.

They are the means by which you adapt the idea and its implementation to increase quality.

Putting Quality Functions Into Practice

I like to use extreme examples when trying to prove a concept or theory. Consider these two extremes:

Extreme 1:

1. Idea
You get the idea when you're drunk.

2. Research & Refine
You check with your mum that the idea is good and she says, "yes dear".

3. Specify
You write the idea on the back of a napkin and spill tea on it, rendering it unreadable.

4. Build & Test
You write the code to realize it without running the code at all, and your test is a simple check that there were no compilation errors.

5. Deploy
You copy the code manually to the server in your closet.

6. Monitor
You ensure the server power is on as you enter and leave the house

Will the assumed value be transformed into real value? Will the real value be of high quality? Extremely unlikely!

Extreme 2:

1. Idea
You have been training yourself to have better ideas regarding a specific problem you want to solve. You go over it in your head and try to prove yourself wrong to make sure the idea makes sense. You trash the first set of ideas and think of a few more until you have an idea you're happy with. You socialize the idea with people outside of your circles to see if they think it's valuable and you rinse and repeat this process.

2. Research & Refine
You iterate on this process a few times. You apply design thinking and modify the idea based on the feedback you get. You research the market and the opportunity and figure out how you will reach customers. You go back and modify the idea according to your findings. You iterate on this and go back to step 1 a few times until you finally have empirical proof that shows your idea is in demand and ready to be realized.

3. Specify
You use a combination of UX wireframes and BDD style stories to define the idea with the team that is going to build and test it. You sit with the team and work with them throughout the development stage. You change the original idea some more based on the feedback from the team.

4. The team writes clean code that respects the separation of concerns principle, amongst other engineering best practices. They practice pair & mob programming and embrace a testing culture. They use an automated testing approach and are dedicated to creating tight feedback loops that allows them to iterate quickly.

5. Deploy
The team creates automated deployment to clustered cloud servers that autoscale on-demand, and you ensure you can trust the deployment through smoke tests. You use services like LaunchDarkly to diligently roll out your assumed value. If any of the deployments fail, the code or the automation is changed until the deployment is successful and the smoke tests pass.

6. Monitor
You regularly monitor the health of the app and receive automated notifications. You also monitor the usability metrics, customer feedback and web/app usage metrics. When you see the usage dropping you go back to step 1 and repeat the entire process to ensure your customers are receiving real value.

Will the assumed value be transformed into real value? Will the real value be of high quality?

I know which extreme I would put my money on!

When the end result is of high quality, it is because quality functions were applied throughout every single stage of delivery. The quality functions are the mechanism that transforms the assumed value into real value. This implies that:

Value cannot exist without Quality

And I mentioned above, quality cannot exist by itself, so the inverse is also true:

Quality cannot exist without Value

In other words, Quality and Value have a Yin-Yang relationship.

Q()

Now as a programmer by trade, I like to think of quality functions as I see them in code, which looks like this:

The above simply says that Q() is all of the quality functions that you apply in your delivery process.

And since quality functions are what transforms assumed value into real value, we can pass the assumed value into the quality functions:

In other words, real value is the product of all the quality functions applied to assumed value.

Quality Belongs Everywhere, and to Everyone

When you look at quality like this, doesn't it seem completely absurd that in most companies, the "job" of quality is given to one person or department, right at the end of a process?

Have a look at Parasoft's research where they asked 780 IT professionals to answer a series of questions about their team's development process. When they asked the different teams "who owns quality?", these were the results:

You can clearly see that the responsibility of quality falls on the testing team in all of the development methodologies, and the testing team typically operates at the tail end of the process. The truth is, most of the opportunities to influence the quality of the assumed value have already passed by then.

There are hundreds, even thousands of quality functions that can be applied to the product development process. Every single person that touches the assumed value is responsible for applying quality functions to it.

This is why, quality needs to be a holistic concern across the whole lifecycle, and this is why I think we need a whole new category of product that unites quality functions to really make a dent in the software quality problem.

Join our mission

I promise you, we're working on this problem. It has been haunting me my entire career and it's time to do something about it.

If this theme and my comments resonate with you, please let me know by clicking that heart icon and recommending the article to expand the reach of this message.

And if, like me, you feel passionately about the need for prioritizing quality in software development, please connect with me by following me here on Medium, and here on Twitter and at the Xolv.io site and blog where I will update you on our progress. If you would like to contact me, you can do so here.

You can also help me by telling me your story, your opinions, or any other resources you think are pertinent to this cause. How does your team transform assumed value into real value? What quality functions do you apply? I cherish any and all feedback.

I look forward to helping you deliver higher quality software, faster.

Sam.
Other articles I've written:

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What Is Quality? - Quality Faster - Medium

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In my previous post, I spoke about The Forgotten First Principle of Software Delivery: Quality. I promised to explain more about how to measure and define Quality, but to do so, we need to also consider Value, because there is an intrinsic relationship between Quality, Value and... Love! Allow me to explain.

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Pieter Jongerius

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bol.com | Get agile, Pieter Jongerius | 9789063693022 | Boeken

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Get agile (paperback). Scrum is a project management method that dissolves boundaries and distributes responsibilities which in other methods have been protected for years. It is a radically different way of working: as many activities as possible take place at the same time, in the same room. Sc...

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Martijn Driessen

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bol.com | De ondernemende ondernemer | 9789081101950 | Martijn Driessen | Boeken

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De ondernemende ondernemer (paperback). Droom je wel eens over ondernemer worden, of ben je het al, dan geeft De ondernemende ondernemer je nieuwe inspiratie en motivatie. Het gaat in op wat ondernemerschap is en wat je er voor nodig hebt. Het legt de psychologie van de ondernemer bloot. Het besp...

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"One does not begin with answers," the legendary business consultant Peter Drucker once said. "One begins by asking, 'What are our questions?'"

The notion that questions may at times be more valuable to a business than answers is counterintuitive. But in my research into the value of inquiry, I'm finding a growing number of today's leading business consultants share Drucker's view on the critical importance of getting company leaders to focus on asking the right questions. "It's the number one thing I spend my time thinking about these days," says Dev Patnaik of design firm Jump Associates. Eric Ries, meanwhile, finds that as he trains companies in Lean Startup methodology, one of his biggest challenges is getting his clients to "acknowledge uncertainty and ask the seemingly dumb questions." According to Keith Yamashita of design consultancy SYPartners, "In business, our ability to ask questions is an opportunity to reframe the challenges in front of us."

But as Yamashita notes, that can only happen if business leaders are willing to question boldly. He says we're coming off an era of "small-minded questions" geared to efficiency: How can we do it faster, cheaper, where can we cut? "But in order to innovate today," Yamashita maintains, "companies must ask more expansive questions."

What follows are five big, bold questions every company should be asking, according to Yamashita, Ries, Harvard Business School professor and author Clayton Christensen, and consultants Jack Bergstrand of Brand Velocity and Tim Ogilvie of Peer Insight.
Keith Yamashita
Sure, it's a bit grand, as Yamashita acknowledges. But the business environment of today and tomorrow demands a company mindset that goes beyond mundane corporate concerns. To arrive at a powerful sense of purpose, Yamashita says, companies today need "a fundamental orientation that is outward looking"-so they can understand what people out there in the world truly desire and need, and what's standing in the way. At the same time, business leaders also must look inward, to try to clarify their own core values and larger ambitions. In trying to unearth all of this, Yamashita doesn't just use one big question; he employs a series of them. What does the world hunger for? What are the big challenges? Who have we (as a company) historically been when we've been at our best? Who must we fearlessly become?

Yamashita believes companies must develop a culture that is 'excessively curious about the outside world.'

In terms of tackling the first two questions, Yamashita believes companies "must develop a culture that is excessively curious about the outside world"-and be able to identify deep needs as well as the right "hairy problem" to focus on. Rather than try to save the whole world at once, companies should zero in on the challenge that's most compelling and appropriate. In his client Coca-Cola's case, Yamashita says, because of the sheer volume of bottles they put out into the world every day, the need to develop local, closed-loop recycling emerged as a pressing grand challenge.

The "who we've been" and "who we must become" questions require a willingness to look back (because at the finest moments in a company's history, Yamashita holds, its core values come shining through) while also looking ahead, to envision a version of the company that does not yet exist. At the intersection of these questions resides the big overriding one about purpose-the question that matters above all else: "In the end, as a human being or an institution, you have to understand why you were put on this earth," he says, "and what actions you're going to take to deliver on that purpose."
Jack Bergstrand
There's a natural tendency for company leaders to focus on what they should start doing immediately. But the harder question has to do with what you're willing to eliminate. If you can't answer that question, Bergstrand maintains, "it lessens your chances of being successful at what you want to do next-because you'll be sucking up resources doing what's no longer needed and taking those resources away from what should be a top priority." Moreover, if you can't figure out what you should stop doing, it might be an early warning sign that you don't know what your strategy is.

And yet, Bergstrand notes, it is very difficult for most companies to decide to stop doing things-especially programs or products that were once successful. "We don't like to kill our babies," he says. Corporate politics can get in the way, too; individuals or groups within a company are naturally inclined to protect and defend their own projects. On top of all that, it's just a lot more fun to focus on the new than to deal with the old. "Even asking the question about 'what should we stop' makes people inside a company uncomfortable," Bergstrand says. "It often takes an outsider or a new management team to even be willing to raise the question."
Clayton Christensen
Christensen, who pioneered the concept of disruptive innovation, observes that business leaders can sometimes use hypothetical "what if" questions to temporarily impose artificial constraints: What if we had to sell our $100 product for a buck; how might we go about doing that? Such questions can also be used to temporarily break free of existing constraints and biases.

Christensen's big question is a classic example of the latter, and he loves it because it enables leaders to stop focusing on pre-existing beliefs and structures-"the stuff they've already invested in"-and come at the business with a fresh approach. He says the question is most useful "if, at any point in the future, you see the possibility that the core business might slow down." But even if your company is going great guns, answering this question can point to future opportunities and help your share price to outperform the market by showing "that there's more growth here than analysts may have thought."

There's more growth here than analysts may have thought.

Christensen's question could be seen as a cousin of the famous one asked by Intel's co-founder Andrew Grove when the company was trying to decide whether to shift its focus away from making memory chips. If we were kicked out of the company, Grove asked his partner Gordon Moore, what do you think the new CEO would do? They reasoned that a new leader would feel no emotional attachment to the declining memory chip business-and would probably leave it behind. Grove and Moore did likewise, as they shifted Intel's focus to microprocessors.
Tim Ogilvie
Ogilvie's question is really asking, Where in the company is it safe to ask radical questions? As Ogilvie sees it, you can't necessarily do that everywhere. "As an established business," he says, "you've got all these promises you're keeping to your current customers-you have to stay focused on that. But that may not have a future." So the question becomes, "Where, within the company, can you explore heretical questions that could threaten the business as it is-without contaminating what you're doing now?"

In answering that question, it's up to company leadership to "provide permission and protocols for experimentation," he says. That means supplying the time and resources for people to explore new questions, as well as establishing methods: "how might we" questioning sessions, ethnography, in-market experimentation. It can also mean cordoning off this area of the business, but not too much. There should be a clear line of visibility between the core business and the "Petri dish" part of the company-so that each can influence the other.

Ogilvie says another way to phrase this question is, Where is the place we can be a startup again? And surprisingly, he thinks it's a question that even startups should ask themselves. "Startups are so desperate not to be a startup," says Ogilvie (himself a former startup CEO). "They're so anxious to be post-revenue and post-profit that you can almost give up what's great about being a startup too soon. They get built for execution, and once they're having success they'll very quickly start thinking, 'We've got to stick to our knitting.'" All of which means they've outgrown their original Petri dish-and might need a new one.

Shifting emphasis from Ogilvie's where to the how of experimentation, Ries's question is counterintuitive for most managers, who tend to think in terms of "making products," not "making experiments." But as Ries points out, anytime you're doing something new, "it's an experiment whether you admit it or not. Because it is not a fact that it's going to work."

Where is the place we can be a startup again?

So how do companies get better at experimenting? Ries says you start with the acknowledgment that "we are operating amid all this uncertainty-and that the purpose of building a product or doing any other activity is to create an experiment to reduce that uncertainty." This means that instead of asking "What will we do?" or "What will we build?" the emphasis should be on "What will we learn?"

"And then you work backwards to the simplest possible thing-the minimum viable product-that can get you the learning," he says.

Just this one change-before you get to any of the more complex Lean Startup methodology-can make a world of difference, Ries insists. For one thing, it can help unlock the creativity that's already there in your company. "Most companies are full of ideas, but they don't know how to go about finding out if those ideas work," Ries says. "If you want to harvest all those ideas, allow employees to experiment more-so they can find out the answers to their questions themselves."
In the second of this two-part series, we'll consider five more bold questions from Christensen, Ogilvie, Patnaik, consultant/author Noel Tichy, and creative consultant Min Basadur.

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The 5 Questions Every Company Should Ask Itself

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"One does not begin with answers," the legendary business consultant Peter Drucker once said. "One begins by asking, 'What are our questions?'" The notion that questions may at times be more valuable to a business than answers is counterintuitive.

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How to Find Your Purpose and Do What You Love

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How to Find Your Purpose and Do What You Love

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"Find something more important than you are," philosopher Dan Dennett once said in discussing the secret of happiness, "and dedicate your life to it." But how, exactly, do we find that? Surely, it isn't by luck. I myself am a firm believer in the power of curiosity and choice as the engine of fulfillment, but precisely how you arrive at your true calling is an intricate and highly individual dance of discovery. Still, there are certain factors - certain choices - that make it easier. Gathered here are insights from seven thinkers who have contemplated the art-science of making your life's calling a living.

PAUL GRAHAM ON HOW TO DO WHAT YOU LOVE

Every few months, I rediscover and redevour Y-Combinator founder Paul Graham's fantastic 2006 article, How to Do What You Love. It's brilliant in its entirety, but the part I find of especial importance and urgency is his meditation on social validation and the false merit metric of "prestige":

What you should not do, I think, is worry about the opinion of anyone beyond your friends. You shouldn't worry about prestige. Prestige is the opinion of the rest of the world.

[...]

Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you'd like to like.

[...]

Prestige is just fossilized inspiration. If you do anything well enough, you'll make it prestigious. Plenty of things we now consider prestigious were anything but at first. Jazz comes to mind-though almost any established art form would do. So just do what you like, and let prestige take care of itself.

Prestige is especially dangerous to the ambitious. If you want to make ambitious people waste their time on errands, the way to do it is to bait the hook with prestige. That's the recipe for getting people to give talks, write forewords, serve on committees, be department heads, and so on. It might be a good rule simply to avoid any prestigious task. If it didn't suck, they wouldn't have had to make it prestigious.

More of Graham's wisdom on how to find meaning and make wealth can be found in Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age.

ALAIN DE BOTTON ON SUCCESS

Alain de Botton, modern philosopher and creator of the "literary self-help genre", is a keen observer of the paradoxes and delusions of our cultural conceits.

In The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, he takes his singular lens of wit and wisdom to the modern workplace and the ideological fallacies of "success."

His terrific 2009 TED talk offers a taste:

One of the interesting things about success is that we think we know what it means. A lot of the time our ideas about what it would mean to live successfully are not our own. They're sucked in from other people. And we also suck in messages from everything from the television to advertising to marketing, etcetera. These are hugely powerful forces that define what we want and how we view ourselves. What I want to argue for is not that we should give up on our ideas of success, but that we should make sure that they are our own. We should focus in on our ideas and make sure that we own them, that we're truly the authors of our own ambitions. Because it's bad enough not getting what you want, but it's even worse to have an idea of what it is you want and find out at the end of the journey that it isn't, in fact, what you wanted all along.

HUGH MACLEOD ON SETTING BOUNDARIES

Cartoonist Hugh MacLeod is as well-known for his irreverent doodles as he is for his opinionated musings on creativity, culture, and the meaning of life. In Ignore Everybody: and 39 Other Keys to Creativity, he gathers his most astute advice on the creative life. Particularly resonant with my own beliefs about the importance of choices is this insight about setting boundaries:

16. The most important thing a creative person can learn professionally is where to draw the red line that separates what you are willing to do, and what you are not.

Art suffers the moment other people start paying for it. The more you need the money, the more people will tell you what to do. The less control you will have. The more bullshit you will have to swallow. The less joy it will bring. Know this and plan accordingly.

Later, MacLeod echoes Graham's point about prestige above:

28. The best way to get approval is not to need it.

This is equally true in art and business. And love. And sex. And just about everything else worth having."

LEWIS HYDE ON WORK VS. LABOR

After last year's omnibus of 5 timeless books on fear and the creative process, a number of readers rightfully suggested an addition: Lewis Hyde's 1979 classic, The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World, of which David Foster Wallace famously said, "No one who is invested in any kind of art can read The Gift and remain unchanged."

In this excerpt, originally featured here in January, Hyde articulates the essential difference between work and creative labor, understanding which takes us a little closer to the holy grail of vocational fulfillment:

Work is what we do by the hour. It begins and, if possible, we do it for money. Welding car bodies on an assembly line is work; washing dishes, computing taxes, walking the rounds in a psychiatric ward, picking asparagus - these are work. Labor, on the other hand, sets its own pace. We may get paid for it, but it's harder to quantify... Writing a poem, raising a child, developing a new calculus, resolving a neurosis, invention in all forms - these are labors.

Work is an intended activity that is accomplished through the will. A labor can be intended but only to the extent of doing the groundwork, or of not doing things that would clearly prevent the labor. Beyond that, labor has its own schedule.

...

There is no technology, no time-saving device that can alter the rhythms of creative labor. When the worth of labor is expressed in terms of exchange value, therefore, creativity is automatically devalued every time there is an advance in the technology of work.

Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has a term for the quality that sets labor apart from work: flow - a kind of intense focus and crisp sense of clarity where you forget yourself, lose track of time, and feel like you're part of something larger. If you've ever pulled an all-nighter for a pet project, or even spent 20 consecutive hours composing a love letter, you've experienced flow and you know creative labor.

STEVE JOBS ON NOT SETTLING

In his now-legendary 2005 Stanford commencement address, an absolute treasure in its entirety, Steve Jobs makes an eloquent case for not settling in the quest for finding your calling - a case that rests largely on his insistence upon the power of intuition:

Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

ROBERT KRULWICH ON FRIENDS

Robert Krulwich, co-producer of WNYC's fantastic Radiolab, author of the ever-illuminating Krulwich Wonders and winner of a Peabody Award for broadcast excellence, is one of the finest journalists working today. In another great commencement address, he articulates the infinitely important social aspect of loving what you do - a kind of social connectedness far more meaningful and genuine than those notions of prestige and peer validation.

You will build a body of work, but you will also build a body of affection, with the people you've helped who've helped you back. This is the era of Friends in Low Places. The ones you meet now, who will notice you, challenge you, work with you, and watch your back. Maybe they will be your strength.

...

If you can... fall in love, with the work, with people you work with, with your dreams and their dreams. Whatever it was that got you to this school, don't let it go. Whatever kept you here, don't let that go. Believe in your friends. Believe that what you and your friends have to say... that the way you're saying it - is something new in the world.

THE HOLSTEE MANIFESTO

You might recall The Holstee Manifesto as one of our 5 favorite manifestos for the creative life, an eloquent and beautifully written love letter to the life of purpose. (So beloved is the manifesto around here that it has earned itself a permanent spot in the Brain Pickings sidebar, a daily reminder to both myself and you, dear reader, of what matters most.)

This is your life. Do what you love, and do it often. If you don't like something, change it. If you don't like your job, quit. If you don't have enough time, stop watching TV. If you are looking for the love of your life, stop; they will be waiting for you when you start doing things you love.

The Holstee Manifesto is now available as a beautiful letterpress print, a 5×7 greeting card printed on handmade paper derived from 50% elephant poo and 50% recycled paper, and even a baby bib - because it's never too early to instill the values of living from passion.

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How to Find Your Purpose and Do What You Love

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"Find something more important than you are," philosopher Dan Dennett once said in discussing the secret of happiness, "and dedicate your life to it." But how, exactly, do we find that? Surely, it isn't by luck.

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Meaningful companies are built upon a strong timeless vision. Let's look at some examples...

"To organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." - Google

"To be the pulse of the planet" - Twitter

"To be earth's most customer centric company; to build a place where people can come to find and discover anything they might want to buy online." - Amazon

These statements may sound abstract and grandiose, but as you begin to think about it, you realise why a plan like " To be the Best iPhone Photo App for Sharing Pictures with Facebook Friends" or " Let's Build Stuff and See What Happens, Right? " just won't cut it.

The vision for a company must be robust for years at a time. Technologies, social networks, trends, all come and go, and a company must stay relevant regardless. Notice how Google doesn't mention search, Amazon doesn't mention books, and Twitter says nothing about apps or tweets. This is long term thinking. You can't base your company around current technologies, trends, or other companies. It's about what you are doing for your customers. If you set out to build "The Number One MP3 Player for Bebo Pages", well, sorry about it.

What start-ups need a vision

A vision lets you set goals that define your path and progress. For each goal, whether it's "10% market share" or "100K Users", you can plan a strategy for achieving it. A strategy lets you choose tactics, that is, different ways you can go about achieving it. Each tactic lets you pick your activities, the actual work to make it happen.

Ok, that's a lot. Let's take a specific example...

In practice there's more than one goal, and as a result there's multiple day to day activities. Here's how that looks...

Setting a vision lets everyone know what direction they're going, even in small teams. It helps you understand what activities are beneficial and which ones are valueless distractions. It tells you when to say no, and when to say Hell Yeah. As Michael Porter wrote in What is Strategy, "Overall advantage or disadvantage results from all a company's activities, not only a few." A vision lets you define those activities.

The Cheshire Cat Problem

When you see all activities as being useful, no activities are useful. The problem with a plan like "Let's keep adding good features" is that it's hard for people to agree what's a useful thing to spend time on. This is fine during exploratory days when you're fishing around for a niche or an angle, but when you're specifically trying to achieve something you need a common vision to help you define what you should be doing. When you don't know where you're going, any road looks good.

Obviously letting a vision guide your team requires smart, motivated, and trustworthy people. In the world of startups that's just table stakes.

Long road image by Stuck in Customs.
Pyramid concept borrowed from Diane Railton.

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Why startups need a strong vision - Inside Intercom

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Meaningful companies are built upon a strong timeless vision. Let's look at some examples... "To organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." - Google "To be the pulse of the planet" - Twitter "To be earth's most customer centric company; to build a place where people can come to find and discover anything they might want to buy online."

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Trello

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Capture, organize, and tackle your to-dos from anywhere | Trello

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Make the impossible, possible with Trello. The ultimate tool to boost your productivity. Escape the clutter and chaos—stay efficient with Inbox, Boards, and Planner from anywhere, even on mobile.

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Basismodel Mentality

Mentality™ is het unieke waarden- en leefstijlonderzoek van Motivaction dat een effectieve kijk geeft op doelgroepenindeling en -benadering.

Door onderzoek naar de belevingswereld van mensen, krijgen onze klanten meer inzicht in wat hun doelgroepen beweegt, hoe trends ontstaan en in welke bredere context zij opereren. Mentality™ heeft zich bewezen als een beter middel om het gedrag van mensen te verklaren en te begrijpen dan de traditionele indelingen op basis van leeftijd, geslacht, opleiding en inkomen. Daarmee biedt deze onderzoeksmethode je een zeer effectieve input voor marketing- en communicatiestrategie.

Met het Mentality™-model groepeert Motivaction mensen naar hun levensinstelling. Nederland kent acht sociale milieus, zoals weergegeven op de Mentality overviewpagina. We definiëren deze sociale milieus op basis van persoonlijke opvattingen en waarden die aan de levensstijl van mensen ten grondslag liggen. De mensen uit hetzelfde sociale milieu delen waarden ten aanzien van werk, vrije tijd en politiek, en tonen overeenkomstige ambities en aspiraties. Ieder milieu heeft een eigen leefstijl en consumptiepatroon, die tot uiting komen in concreet gedrag. Op basis van meer dan een decennium aan empirisch onderzoek is gebleken dat de sociale milieus een stabiele, consistente en praktisch bruikbare segmentatie vormen. Voor een lijst met openbare publicaties en achtergrondinformatie over Mentality, zie Mentality in publicaties. Of doe de Mentality-test om te achterhalen bij welk milieu jou het beste past.

Wat levert het inzetten van Mentality je op?

Directe benefits

Diepgaand inzicht in groepen consumenten/burgers

Input voor communicatie en tone of voice

Scherpe concurrentieanalyses

Snel resultaat

Lange termijn benefits

Zicht op trends en relatie met maatschappelijke context

Coherentie in strategische beslissingen

Databaseverrijkingsmogelijkheden

Koppeling met mediagebruik, retail en consumptiegedrag

Koppeling met postcodegebieden

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Mentality™ is het unieke waarden- en leefstijlonderzoek van Motivaction dat een effectieve kijk geeft op doelgroepenindeling en -benadering. Door onderzoek naar de belevingswereld van mensen, krijgen onze klanten meer inzicht in wat hun doelgroepen beweegt, hoe trends ontstaan en in welke bredere context zij opereren.

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