Why do entrepreneurs run?

29 05 2009

Kevin Owocki asked a question I’ve wondered about myself: Why do so many entrepreneurs run? (Larry Cheng too)

I’m not interested in getting to the bottom of cause vs. correlation, I’m just pointing out that it seems there are a higher percentage of entrepreneurs and executives involved in endurance sports that the general population. While I still have a lot to prove to be considered in the same entrepreneurial orbit as many of the examples I’m thinking of, I definitely have the entrepreneurial bug. And I couldn’t imagine life without running – if you’ve had to deal with me on a day that I wasn’t able to run, you probably got my impatient side (sorry).

So what is it about being a runner that translates well to running a company?

  1. I love a challenge. Lots of people in business are competitive, but I especially like competing against former versions of myself. I love to progressively go further and faster.
  2. I love data and metrics. You don’t have to be a gadget geek to be a runner, but if you are a gadget geek by nature running will feed your addiction. Exhibit A: my Garmin 405. Heart rate, time, distance, real-time pace (the holy grail), virtual training partners, this has it all.
  3. I have a healthy ‘reality distortion field’ around my abilities. Let’s be real, you don’t start or run a company without thinking that you’re better than the average Joe. And you don’t sign up for a marathon unless you think there’s some hidden athletic potential just waiting to be given life. Of course you’re given plenty of reminders along the way that you are just as human as the next guy (in running and business), but in your own mind you have to have an edge.
  4. Running quiets my mind. Most of us are constantly thinking – we never mentally “clock out”. Running is cathartic in that it’s the one time I can actually clear my mind and just listen to my breathing, appreciate the scenery, and rest my thoughts. I’ve talked to a lot of people who are the exact opposite – they do their best thinking on a run. Not me. I zone out, and it’s fantastic.
  5. Running teaches me how to motivate myself. This is the big one. The daily execution needed to get fast is a perfect metaphor for business. It gets hard. Morning comes early. There are lots of unexciting, repetitive miles. The late miles of a race are really, really tough. Putting yourself through all of that as a runner teaches you an amazing amount about yourself and how you respond to goals, setbacks, little victories, and “walls”. I’ve learned lots of tricks from running that also work to keep me motivated in my work life.

How about you? What else do you do that translates to your career?


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Living The Dream

30 04 2009

“If you go to Stanford University, you’re in the rare position of privilege that you’ll pretty much get to choose what you do in life, and that puts you in less than 1% of the world. I always like to say to people like the folks in this room, ‘You have no excuse in life not to do things that you’re passionate about’. There are a lot of people that will never get to, and so if you’re doing something that you’re not passionate about you’re flunking a cosmic IQ test. And you could learn that IQ test now, or you can learn it when you’re 40 and miserable in a job you don’t like. But in the end, you know what your passion is, and when people and forces in the world try to prevent you from pursuing it turn off the noise and the hype and believe yourself, because so few people do.” – Mike Maples, Maples Investments

Mike Maples said that in a presentation to Stanford students in January 2008. There are a handful of schools that you could substitute for “Stanford University” in that quote, and something hit me quite powerfully when I heard Mike’s talk:

I go to one of those universities.

MIT puts me in that “rare position of privilege”, and I’ll always be grateful to the admissions officer that found it in his or her heart to let me in. The quote reminded me of another MIT story:

There’s a great lesson at about 0:45. All of us who have been given this gift to choose what we do in life don’t owe it to ourselves to do what we’re passionate about.

We owe it to everyone who won’t ever have that chance.

It’s up to us to follow our passions, so that someday years from now we can tell the story about the time we had a choice to make, and we chose to ignore the “noise and the hype” and believe ourselves. Believe the voice that whispers about passion while the talking heads shout conventional wisdom. And someone will hear that story while they’re young, and despite never having this gift to go to MIT or Stanford or wherever they will choose to follow their passion too. And who knows what will come of that.

Follow your passion people.


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What tech can learn from Toyota

16 04 2009

Today I had the pleasure of listening to Jamie Bonini teach the Toyota Production System (TPS). I’m not an auto industry guy (not to be confused with “car guy”, which I am), but from what I had heard of TPS I knew it applied to more than building Camrys so I was excited to hear what Jamie had to say.

This isn’t a new insight to apply TPS to tech; others have outlined opportunities for cross pollination. Regardless, here’s a few things that stood out to me:

Toyota’s culture of no waste, ruthless precision, just in time, etc. is strict by North American standards. Jamie called it “the collective over the individual”. Yet Toyota is also a recognized innovator, and widely copied. But no one (with the possible exception of Honda) seems to be able to replicate the magic.* The irony is that the rigorous culture is what enables innovation without putting the entire system at risk. Here’s what I mean:

Everyone at Toyota is encouraged – even required – to behave like a scientist. While the rest of us are cheering about goals and visions, TPS distinguishes between a goal and a hypothesis. Every process in TPS is a hypothesis, from the mundane to the complex, so there is a “control” for every process and anyone can predict specific changes that will give a certain outcome.

And they do. So they try it.

If the outcome is better than the “control” outcome, then they have found a better way. If not then no problem, this was just an experiment performed locally. Taken a step further, every action is an experiment since every process is a hypothesis.

An extension of this philosophy is that there is no “pooling” in TPS, ie a product waiting in queue to be processed by the next available machine. Each part is handled by a specific machine or person (yes this applies to people too). At first glance this seems counter-intuitive; what if you have a backlog at one station, and an identical machine sitting idle? Well that’s exactly the point. Why were the parts allocated inefficiently in the first place? By hard-coding the process flow, TPS exposes inefficiencies in the system.

So how does this apply to tech? Technology, and especially software, is the perfect playground to apply TPS – maybe even better than cars due to the ease of moving bits vs sheet metal. At its heart, TPS is about waging war on waste. Toyota sees waste in overproduction or defects needing to be reworked, but in our world that translates to “building something nobody wants“. It can be a feature or an entire product, but at the end of the day an engineer made something a user didn’t want. That’s a compounding problem because you 1) lost time 2) didn’t learn anything about your customer and 3) still have to pay the engineer.

One way to begin implementing TPS is to work in small batches. Doing so allows you to spot inefficiencies, conduct local experiments, and quickly integrate learning back in the “control” process.

*Reminds me of Zappos in this sense, who has nearly open sourced their incredible model. Still, no one has yet matched their culture and therefore hasn’t fully executed the model.


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Categories : Inspiration, MIT

Book Recommedation: Better by Atul Gawande

28 09 2008

If you’re looking for a quick, meaningful, and thought provoking read try Better: A Surgeon’s Notes On Performance by Atul Gawande. Standing in a book store before a long flight, the subtitle caught my attention, and I decided to pick it up. My grandpa is a surgeon and I’ve always been fascinated with his work, so I was curious what a surgeon would have to say about performance, and presumably achieving better performance.

Better was great. Several stories about how health care providers have gotten better at hand washing, treating cystic fibrosis, and delivering babies, for example. The great common theme is that a few simple modifications in thinking and/or behavior can have great impact. For a surgeon, this means more patients live.

One suggestion that Gawande makes that I wanted to call out is to count something.

Regardless of what one ultimately does in medicine – or outside medicine, for that matter – one should be a scientist in this world. In the simplest terms, this means one should count something…It doesn’t really matter what you count. You don’t need a research grant. The only requirement is that what you count should be interesting to you.

Gawande shares the story of Dr. Virginia Apgar, creator of the Apgar Score. Dr. Apgar overcame several hurdles to become a doctor, and made a huge contribution to the mortality rates of infants by creating a simple scoring mechanism that rates how healthy a newborn is at birth. She observed that many newborns born with conditions such as low birth weight, blue skin, or weak breathing were essentially left to die. She began scoring newborns’ conditions in her own hospital, and later published the scoring system. It turned out that by simply quantifying a newborn’s state, doctors changed how they administered treatment and as a result, thousands of young lives are saved each year.

I don’t know what I’ll count, but I will try counting something.


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Tiger Woods: Mental Toughness

17 06 2008

“The will to win means nothing without the will to prepare.” – Juma Ikangas, winner 1989 NYC Marathon

Two of my favorite authors are Malcolm Gladwell and ESPN’s Bill Simmons; Gladwell for his ability to make ordinary things fascinating and Simmons for his hilarious take on the psyche of a sports fan. Coincidentally they had an email exchange that was posted here.

Cue Gladwell:

“This is actually a question I’m obsessed with: Why don’t people work hard when it’s in their best interest to do so?

“The (short) answer is that it’s really risky to work hard, because then if you fail you can no longer say that you failed because you didn’t work hard. It’s a form of self-protection… If you get drunk the night before an exam instead of studying and you fail, then the problem is that you got drunk. If you do study and you fail, the problem is that you’re stupid — and stupid, for a student, is a death sentence. The point is that it is far more psychologically dangerous and difficult to prepare for a task than not to prepare. People think that Tiger is tougher than Mickelson because he works harder. Wrong: Tiger is tougher than Mickelson and because of that he works harder.” (Emphasis added)

Like many other American information workers, I was mesmerized by today’s US Open. Tiger showed us what is so great about sports, and Rocco Mediate is due his respect for pushing Tiger to show his brilliance in order to win. If you didn’t catch it, Nike aired an ad that featured Earl Woods (Tiger’s late father) talking about Tiger’s incredible focus:

We can’t all be Tiger, but we can work like Tiger.


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Work vs Play

8 05 2008

I’m convinced that the reason many people are not succeeding at their current ambition is that they are playing instead of working. (1) There could be several paths to playing work rather than working on work, but the result is the same: well-intentioned people, most of whom are reasonably talented, who languish in vocations they ought to be succeeding in.

How can you tell if you’re working on work or just playing work? You probably already know. If it makes you just a little uncomfortable to read this, but a train wreck-esque fascination keeps your eyes moving across the screen, it’s a good sign you’re among the guilty. However, the fact that you’re reading – rather than avoiding – these words probably means you can get back to working without too much trouble. So, how?

Start by recognizing the symptoms. People who play work know what they would rather be doing, it’s just painful to get started. An obvious symptom of playing work is expecting it to be fun all the time. After all, it’s called work. That said, real work is fun – sometimes. Oft repeated quotes about “loving what you do” lead us to believe that there’s something wrong if we don’t laugh ourselves hoarse at the office (2). But that’s not the kind of fun intended. Fun happens, like when a milestone is reached or your hard work is recognized. Along the way, however, there are some necessary evils. Avoiding the distasteful parts makes it difficult, if not impossible, to experience the great parts.

Another neat trick to avoid real work is to wait for the silver bullet. This one’s especially tempting because you convince yourself that you’re actually making the right decision given the conditions. Not only does the part of your brain that seeks comfort get served, but your ego does as well. Better to listen to General Patton and get to work on a “good plan violently executed today.”

There are other sure signs of play. If you’re never criticized, corrected, opposed, held responsible, or possibly even ridiculed, you’re probably not doing real work, at least not the variety that has far reaching impact.

If you’re always doing what you want at the time, it’s probably not work.

If you’re not following some preconceived strategy, it’s probably not work.

If you aren’t seeking feedback, it’s probably not work.

Back to Work

Your particular brand of play may vary, but there’s a sure way to get back to work: don’t wait for a perfect plan. (3) Since the last time you worked, you’ve risked no failure on the sidelines. You’ve stayed safe. The siren song of the perfect plan falsely ensures success, while the ‘best you have’ route is, by definition, prone to failure. The fallacy, of course, is that the perfect plan is a myth, and its followers will wake up one day having sealed their failure. (4) On the other hand, “…the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.” (5) Be dangerous.

That’s it really. No 12 steps, no Harvard-born frameworks, just an invitation to begin.

Begin now.

Begin to be dangerous.

***

(1) Just to be clear, this doesn’t describe all unsuccessful people, only some, but there are a lot of them.
(2) For example, “Find your own play, your own self-renewing compulsion, and you will become the person you are meant to be.” – George Sheehan
(3) “In any moment of decision the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing.” – Teddy Roosevelt
(4) “Action always generates inspiration. Inspiration seldom generates action.” – Frank Tibolt
(5) From T.E. Lawrence. The full quote is, “All men dream; but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds awake to find that it was vanity; But the dreamers of day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes to make it possible.”


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Become What You Love

1 05 2008

You’ve heard it before: “do what you love”. Steve Jobs told Stanford graduates that “the only way to do great work is to love what you do.” I’ve always been passionate about finding what I loved, having first heard the mantra from my grandpa. On that journey I’ve quit jobs, ended relationships, and sold enough of my belongings that what remained fit in the back of my car.

Important as it may be, I’ve found that finding what you love is more problematic than it sounds. As with dating, there are lots of signals that can be interpreted as love and not all of them are real. For example, I love triathlons; am I supposed to love work like I love triathlons? Expecting to feel runners’ high 40 hours a week seems excessive. There has to be some reasonable timeframe implied when asking, “What do I love to do?” And then there are the temptations of prestige, exhilarating risk, and wealth. Many careers are a path to all three, but are these things the root of passion for your work? Hardly. Even benefiting society can be an imperfect indicator of fulfillment. Sewage engineers, for example, help millions of people, but I don’t see them giving commencement addresses at Stanford.

As is often the case, it’s insightful to turn this problem on its head. Rather than ask, “What do I love to do?” ask, “What is it like when I don’t love what I do?” For most people this is easy. For me, I feel under-engaged, uncreative, and unfulfilled. Basically, I don’t like who I am when I’m not doing something I love, and there’s the key: “who I am”. It turns out that it’s not that finding what you love is hard, it’s that “What do I love to do?” is the wrong question. “Who do I want to become?” and it’s corresponding axiom, “Become what you love” are much more useful.

Seeking to become rather than to do leads to an entirely different set of goals, habits, and values. In our cocktail party culture, the question “So, what do you do?” is really a proxy for “Who are you?” since we so closely associate personal attributes with professional pursuits. Truly happy people have narrowed the gap between who they are and what they do, and they view these two questions interchangeably. They must, in order to set free their full creative capacity.

The question “Who do I want to become?” is remarkably simple to answer for most people: a creator, a healer, a leader. Many titles would fit under any given answer to the Become question, but the values that you surround yourself with in pursuit of becoming, say, a healer are identical for most people: compassion, understanding, service. Setting free the qualities that you feel lurking within yourself is what brings fulfillment – not titles or job descriptions. Once brought to the surface, your most desired attributes work in overdrive since they are so closely aligned with the person you want to become. It’s a creative and productive force that can be felt behind some of the world’s most accomplished, magnetic, and happy people. You can bet that these people have repeatedly made bold decisions to follow their own voice rather than accepted definitions of success.

And that’s the trick. Become what you love.


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