Before rejecting any idea, ask- 'Can it turn out to be Altair BASIC?'

There's an incident narrated in the book- The Launch Pad: Inside Y Combinator, Silicon Valley's Most Exclusive School for Startups about Paul Graham (the founder of YCombinator) and his

peers assessing the start up applications for entry into the 2011 cohort. There was a team of founders that Paul found promising but he didn't find their idea promising. A line in the conversation that went between the panel of judges got me thinking. Before I share what I thought, here is the line:

"We're just not enthusiastic about the idea, appends Livingston.
"Well, it's Altair BASIC," repeats Graham. It's a starting point.
Basically, Jessica Livingston wasn't impressed with the idea but Paul defended by saying the words stated above. Paul used Altair BASIC as a metaphor for the starting point.


Altair BASIC was Microsoft's first product. As per Wikipedia:
Altair BASIC is a discontinued interpreter for the BASIC programming language that ran on the MITS Altair 8800 and subsequent S-100 bus computers. It was Microsoft's first product (as Micro-Soft), distributed by MITS under a contract. Altair BASIC was the start of the Microsoft BASIC product range.
It's developers were: Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Monte Davidoff
The reason I found this metaphor interesting was because Paul used it intelligently to defend the team that he believed in despite them having an unremarkable idea.


I think this story carries lessons both for the innovators and the judge of ideas.


If you are a judge...A profile of judge can be that of a venture capitalist judging whether to many an investment, or a panel selecting ideas for incubation or for a corporate innovation program or like. Judges tend to evaluate more often on the strength of an idea than on the potential of the team pitching it.

To me, what Paul did right was that he bet more on the team that bet the idea than the idea itself. Comparing the situation with Altair BASIC was his way of changing the frame of evaluation on what the team 'could' do rather than on what they had at present.

If you are an innovator...
The Altair BASIC metaphor has a meaning for the founders as well. More often we tend to reject the ideas based on instinct. Sometimes, the difference between a successful venture and not-so-successful ones is a matter of backing your team and the skills and asking this eloquent question:

Can it turn out to be Altair BASIC?

Image source:
https://www.amazon.in/Launch-Pad-Combinator-Exclusive-Startups/dp/0670923494/ref=sr_1_2?crid=2949SHF756U70&keywords=the+launch+pad&qid=1559998965&s=gateway&sprefix=the+launch+%2Caps%2C352&sr=8-2

Nothing happens until something moves

Why do organizations need Innovation Programs ? It's a very broad question and my intention in this blogpost is to share just one perspective around it.

A short sentence answer to this question would be 'beating inertia'.

BlackBerry (from RIM) used to be prominent mobile devices for Enterprises in early 2000s (or around that time). I recall one of the key differentiating features it had was encrypted messaging. In those days, it used to be almost a sign of progression to be owning one of BlackBerrys. However, it wasn't just messaging that end-users liked, it had it's own fan-base for it's physical keyboard. The keyboard was ergonomically designed and one of the best (yet) that i have used in mobile devices. My father recently brought a Blackberry just for ease of use physical keyboards provides.

The team at Blackberry obviously had developed expertise in the physical keyboards. And when the whole world started moving towards soft-keyboards with Nokias and Apples coming in competition, Blackberry was slow to make the shift. They waited, probably because of the expertise they had built that eventually became self-limiting when the competition inspired people to move towards soft keyboards. They did come up with Blackberry Storm, but it probably was a bit late in the game.

Dictionary defines Inertia as "a property of matter by which it continues in its existing state of rest or uniform motion in a straight line, unless that state is changed by an external force."
It is a tendency to do nothing or to remain unchanged.

In organization's context, inertia sets in for various reasons. If we take the example of Blackberry into consideration, inertia was caused, possibly by:

1. Blackberry reached the phase of product acceptance by users, with product-market fit happened a long ago. 
2. Engineers and designers achieved expertise in certain way of doing things. Their own expertise blocked their way to achieve break-through thinking.

Like in sports they say, never change a winning combination. Likewise, in case of Blackberry the combination that caused them to win the markets couldn't hold up to changing times. In short, organizational inertia held them back.
The more we are successful in one era, the more our current methods come in our way of success when it is the time to embrace the changing times.

To come back to the question that i asked in the beginning: Organizations need Innovation programs that can help them use the collective mind-power of workforce to come up with the ideas that question the status-quo.

Like Albert Einstein said: "Nothing happens until something moves."

Credits: The post and the examples covered within are inspired from the Coursera course titled: Strategic Innovation: Managing Innovation Initiatives

Image source:

https://www.slideshare.net/StevenKotler/the-secrets-to-creating-a-killer-skunkworks/16-ORGANIZATIONAL_INERTIA_ISthe_notion_that

Innovators follow compass, not maps

This post is in continuation to my post on 'My Talk on Innovation'. As i promised, i am double-clicking on some aspects that i shared in my talk to awesome internship batch at my organization.

Image source: 

I currently work for Citrix. Citrix was found 3 decades ago, in 1989. To put things in perspective, the year 1989 was when internet was still a university project, Windows was as old as v2.1, Dotcom bust was way too far, mobile revolution hasn't happened yet, social media didn't exist. For a company to have seen through the transitions so drastic, it must know the art of reinvention. It's just the testimony to all the right reasons that lead to longevity of the organization.

On the other side of spectrum, we have examples like Nokia smart phones that within a short period of time fell from being a market leader to being almost extinct when Apple came into scene.

Facebook's acquisition of WhatsApp received attention because of the huge sum involved, and that acquisition helped Facebook overcome a fear of irrelevancy. Being an ad-free and largely free service, WhatsApp may not add to Facebook's revenues immediately. In an interview, Mark Zuckerberg mentioned that he is fine with his newer products and services not moving the needles in the business for a long time. Zuckerberg understood the consumer shift towards instant messaging, a feature Facebook didn't have at that time. More than earning immediate revenue, the WhatsApp acquisition has helped Facebook remain a leader in social networking.

My hypothesis after studying these extreme examples is that the companies that followed the compass approach as against the maps approach survived and thrived. Compass is something that gives you a sense of direction of where you are headed to and that sense of direction comes from being aware of what is happening in your field whereas the maps tell you how to go from point A to point B and not worry too much about what's happening beyond that.

The same analogy works well with Innovators as well. If you follow compass approach, we would be encouraged to figure out what is happening in our ecosystem, understanding it's implications and come up with ideas that align with reality. 
And if you follow the maps approach, your thinking is limited in what the next step in an existing idea could be. That eventually leads to limited innovation opportunities.

I am a big proponent of situational awareness as being a key skill to embrace in our careers. Innovators who are situationally aware:
1. Attend Exec meetings and comprehend what is happening in your organization
2. Are intentional about listening and suspend judgement when hearing the customer problems
3. Read frequently about industry trends and reason what it means to them and the organizations.

Doing these and many similar acts, they sharpen the bearings of their compass and are able to identify product gaps and are able to innovate faster than the competition. 


Image source:
https://media.licdn.com/dms/image/C4E12AQG9M5oL-tkhnQ/article-cover_image-shrink_720_1280/0?e=1562803200&v=beta&t=QwwI2gfG7AssgJcmd6NF0qzrv24LovoavmrhewvanC0

An idea that could possibly bridge invention to commercialization time gap

Some insights from a thoughtful course on Innovation via Coursera

1. Manual typewriter: First patent: 1714. First major commercialization: 1878
2. Automobile: First patent: 1860. First major commercialization: 1902
3. VCRs: First patent: 1950. First major commercialization: 1972

Not an exhaustive list of examples, but still some of the inferences:
1. There is almost always a lag between first time a patent is filed to it's commercialization.
2. The time lag between first patent filing and to it's commercialization seem to be decreasing as the time progress.

Even though the lag between invention and commercialization seem to be reduce, the fact is that the lag still exists.

One of my hypothesis about the reason of this lag is that the inventions that were a result of individual brilliance took a long time to commercialize than the inventions that were formed by a group of individuals. I would love to research a bit on this in coming time and (hopefully) prove this hypothesis right.

Having talked about the roles in an innovation team in the last blog, I firmly believe that odds of success (aka commercialization) increases multi-fold if there are right mix of skills in an innovation team i.e. Hacker, Hustler and Hipster (and many be Hotshot as well).

https://voynetch.com/341

What do you think ?

Image source and credits:
https://voynetch.com/341

Innovators embrace diversity in teams

This post is in continuation to my post on 'My Talk on Innovation'. As i promised, i am double-clicking on some aspects that i shared in my talk to awesome internship batch at my organization.

In the corporate folklore, there are very few stories that are as pronounced as that of how Apple started. A lot has already been written about so I would safely quote parts of Wikipedia as a quick refresher:

Apple Computer Company was founded on April 1, 1976, by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne.The company's first product is the Apple I, a computer designed and hand-built entirely by Wozniak, Apple Computer, Inc. was incorporated on January 3, 1977, without Wayne, who had left and sold his share of the company back to Jobs and Wozniak for $800 only twelve days after having co-founded Apple.

I would simply pass off the last sentence in the above excerpt by calling Ronald Wayne as plain unlucky. But this post is not really about Wayne. It is about something that emanates from founder's chemistry between Wozniak and Jobs. 

In this interaction dated 2018, Steve Woznaik said the below about him and Jobs:

Steve Jobs never understood the Computer part of hardware and software and what was really int.

I don't follow financial stuff and thing about business terms. I think about products and technology.

These two sentences sums up, in a way, the contrasting roles played by them in the founding days of Apple. If I have to sum-up their roles in one word, I would say Woznaik was the 'Technology' person and Jobs was a 'Business' person. 

Wait! I have read about a better differentiation of the roles start-up founders play. This was in the book: Make Elephants Fly: The Process of Radical Innovation and he is the excerpt i read:

The Hustler: We like to see that a least one person on the team has a thorough understanding of the business, the customers, and the market. In most startups, this person is called the CEO. This person is also the one who typically sells the vision and the product to the world. So this person should be a great leader and communicator.

The Hacker -Someone who knows the latest technology inside and out and can use this to transform the business. Having a techie on the team from the start is essential. Innovation usually rides a wave of new technologies that disrupt both business and society. The innovation team needs someone who understands how these technologies can be used to reshape and disrupt the world. This technical wizard must also be willing to roll up her sleeves and do the grunt work, like coding and testing. On a mall team, there's no room for delegators. The team needs people willing to do the actual work. In a typical startup, this person would be the lead developer and CTO.

 The Hipster - This is the creative lead. The importance of design thinking in successful startups can't be overestimated. Design is often at the heart of innovation. Small changes in design can have huge impacts. Any good innovation team needs a designer on board from the beginning. YouTube, Slideshare, Etsy, Flickr, Gowalla, Pinterest, Jawbone, Airbnb, Flipboard, Android, and Square all had designers as co founders. Dave McClure, cofounder of accelerator 500 Startups, is fond of saying every team needs a hustler, hacker, and hipster. I like to add a fourth one.

The Hotshot-It helps to have a domain expert on the team, especially if you're attempting something highly technical. This is someone who understands, at the deepest level, the specific problem the team is trying to solve. This is typically a researcher with a PhD or someone with years of experience in the field. Having someone on board with an in-depth knowledge, beyond your typical manager, can make all the difference when it comes to realizing the critical breakthrough. Elon Musk's SpaceX could have never gotten his satellites into orbit without hiring domain experts.The same is true for Craig Venter's mission to build the world's largest database of whole genome, phenotype, and clinical data.

So it is fair to say that Steve Jobs was the Hustler and Steve Woznaik was the Hacker. 

One of my favorite moments while running Innovation programs is kicking off the new programs with new teams. During the kick-off presentation, i tend to present a section which i call "How not to succeed".

One of the 10+ (and growing list) things that i share under this section is "Don't give due attention to assigning the roles". More often I see that a group of 3-4 engineers form a team and assign the roles just for the sake of it. A couple of weeks into the program they realize that hacking (strong skill in the team of engineers) is not achieving full efficiency because hustlers aren't getting feedback and validation from customers and hipster isn't able to articulate the customer experience as well as they should be. In the end, they are behind in the idea execution game.

The teams that i have seen succeed well enough has the roles Hacker, Hipster and Hustler roles clearly marked and working in rhythm.

Successful innovators do embrace diversity in teams.

Image source: 
https://www.amazon.com/Make-Elephants-Fly-Process-Innovation-ebook/dp/B06XFVFGHT

Have you created your "anti-worry" list ?

For all the bashing that social media gets for being addictive, sometimes nasty and often worthless, there are moments, infact quite a few of them, where you end up learning a perspective that can alter the way you approach your days. 

I firmly believe that when you encounter such moments of enlightenment, the first though you should do is to assimilate and share. Knowledge not shared is indeed the knowledge wasted.

This post is dedicated to one such sharing. Today, I came across this short tweet storm by Andrew Hoag. Let me re-iterate the tweets (with due credit and permissions to Andrew). 

1/ As a CEO, it is incredibly difficult to measure your own progress. Behind every summit lies another, taller peak that feels more urgent, never giving enough time to look at how far you’ve come.

2/ The buck stops with you, which gives you nearly infinite things to worry about, and can occupy all of your mental energy.

3/ A hack I have recently developed to counterbalance this is thinking about what you *no longer* have to worry about: PMF, capital, marketing, recruiting, whatever large or small! Take a moment, make a mental inventory.


4/ This “anti-worry” list is a quick measure of your progress and can help put things in perspective. Spend some of that mental energy on gratitude, and the new peaks won’t seem so tall anymore. 

To me this is such a powerful concept explained so simply in just 4 tweets. One of my earlier managers once told me: Every year of our professional and personal lives add extra bit of responsibilities.

The package called responsibilities comes bundled with an add-on called as stress. I beleive to deal with stress there are only 2 ways: embrace an easy life or find ways to hack stress out of your lives.

"Anti-Worry" list seem to be one such hack. It helps us give a perspective of what we have achieved in our days, the sense of which gets so clouded in midst of the fire-fighting that we have to deal with every day.

"Anti-Worry" list also helps us be grateful of what we have by our side. We often tend to forget that there are things worth appreciating in our work and personal lives.

Quoting this article:

Living your life with gratitude means choosing to focus your time and attention on what you appreciate. The goal is not to block out difficulties, but to approach those difficulties from a different perspective. Appreciation softens us. It soothes our turbulent minds by connecting us with the wonderfully ordinary things, great and small, that we might otherwise take for granted.

I don't know Andrew Hoag but I would like to wholeheartedly thank him for sharing such a wonderful concept to live life.

1/ As a CEO, it is incredibly difficult to measure your own progress. Behind every summit lies another, taller peak that feels more urgent, never giving enough time to look at how far you’ve come.

— Andrew Hoag (@ajhoag) May 31, 2019

Strong convictions precedes great actions

In 1997, Eric Yuan joined a video conference start-up Webex as an engineer. Webex went public in 2000 and was eventually acquired by Cisco. Yuan was given an opportunity to lead Webex engineering group in Cisco. Over a period of time, Eric grew unhappy because he believed that the product sucked because of the following reasons:

1. Each time users logged on to a Webex conference, the company’s systems would have to identify which version of the product (iPhone, Android, PC or Mac) to run, which slowed things down. 

2. Too many people on the line would strain the connection, leading to choppy audio and video. 3. And the service lacked modern features like screen-sharing for mobile.

Eric tried to convince Cisco decision makers to consider making the changes to make Webex more useful and desirable but couldn't manage to do it. As a result, he decided to move on from Cisco and later found Zoom.us. Zoom recently raised its IPO, price of $36 per share, valuing the company at $9.2 billion and making Yuan a billionaire.

Story source: Forbes article

One of the things that amazed me about this story was Eric's conviction about where Webex was going wrong and the extension of that conviction that led him to start Zoom to fill the gaps he saw at Webex. 

A lot of us find ourselves in similar situations at work where our ideas and solutions find no place in decision maker's list of priorities. 

What do we usually do ? 

More often we don't choose to pursue our path and surrender to the suggested path because we choose to believe less in our ideas and thought-process. We choose to embrace a lesser version of ourselves. One thing that bears mentioning in this case is that the odds of success that Eric achieved is probably one in thousands or even less but still lack of conviction is something that plagues individual's growth even for initiatives with lesser things at stake.

The learning that stands out for me is that we shouldn't change our beliefs, thoughts and ideas at the first glimpse of rejection. We should figure out alternate means to express, present and convey them and be creative in finding alternate routes to success.

I am no expert at teaching anyone about conviction but i at one area where i successfully applied power to conviction was in my running career. When i started running longer distances, I did face resistance from my family and closed ones (being from a family where there weren't any active sportspeople). To be fair, there was a degree of loving concern behind the resistance. They didn't want me to get injured or over-exert myself. While i listened to the concerns and tried to explain my point of view as patiently as possible, I didn't drop intensity in practice, training and in running long distances. My conviction in what i was doing lead me to run 17 full marathons (including 2 100Km runs, 1 75 km run) and several half marathons and a shorter distance runs.

Images source:

http://img.picturequotes.com/2/3/2499/strong-convictions-precede-great-actions-quote-1.jpg

https://quotefancy.com/media/wallpaper/3840x2160/105574-Marianne-Williamson-Quote-Conviction-is-a-force-multiplier-If-you.jpg