success
Perfection is the Enemy of Progress
The title is a quote from Winston Churchill. I have learned in my career that these behaviors can be very costly from a business perspective, especially when decisions affect large parts of a business. It took me years to learn this lesson as I transitioned from perfectionist to “reformed perfectionist,” which was challenging.
Below are a few examples that could help you better understand people like this, and if you are someone like this, it might even provide motivation to try to change.
Early in my career, as I expanded my role from Programmer to Analyst Programmer to Systems Analyst, I often found myself spending too much time and effort on things that had minimal impact. Applications and subsystems looked a little better, ran a little faster, integrated more easily, were easier to modify, and generally had fewer problems. Those are all good things, but in hindsight, those benefits often did not justify the associated costs.
Some industries and applications require a degree of quality and reliability, such as nuclear power plants and lifesaving medical equipment. Since very few things are perfect, there are usually a variety of built-in safeguards to mitigate the impact of errors and failure. I have worked on a few of those systems, and I get it. But they are not in the majority.
Identifying the intersection of meeting the stated requirements, delivering the required quality, and knowing what “good enough” looks like is essential. That’s where diminishing returns set in for every additional hour spent on an activity.
I worked with a hardcore perfectionist at a small software and services company. On a consulting engagement, he spent two days on a task that I viewed as a 2-4 hour effort. We discussed it, and he told me he had at least three more days to finish. We had a heated discussion, and he was frustrated with me for a while. Years later, he admitted I was right, talked about how difficult it was to change, and how much more productive he is now.
I had a consulting engagement with a small software company that spent 10+ years on a SaaS product and was always “just two to three weeks away” from their MVP (minimum viable product). I started working with them over three years ago, and they are still at that point today. Software is never perfect, so waiting for perfection can kill a company.
I have also sold to companies stuck in analysis paralysis because they (leaders and teams) are always second-guessing decisions and want to be 100% certain before making a decision. Those companies need to solve a problem, or they would not be seeking a solution. In most cases, making an informed decision on a proven solution now will solve their problems and deliver value quickly. There is an actual business cost for every month of delay.
Are these behaviors costing you or your company money? If yes, dig a little deeper to understand the potential positive impact making small changes could have. Daily improvement is a great thing!
Success is a Mental Game
This assertion is as true in business as in sports, individually and in teams. So, let’s break it down.
When I watch my local football team, I occasionally see a shift in facial expressions from excitement to frustration – often right before the end of the first half. Sometimes, they recover during halftime and come out renewed and ready to win, but the “gloom and doom” expressions usually translate into suboptimal performance and mistakes. It is frustrating because you know they have the talent to win.
The same thing happens in business – especially in Sales. Sometimes it occurs in the middle of a sales cycle, similar to the example above. Unfortunately, too many people allow a few data points to determine their future trajectory. Why is that?
Whether you own a company or manage a group of people, good leaders aim to optimize their workforce by balancing factors that lead to happy, loyal employees doing their best for themselves, their customers, and their company. Many motivational theories exist, such as Expectancy Theory, Reinforcement Theory, the Role of Instrumentality, Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic Motivation, and more. Since one size rarely fits all, the challenge becomes reward-focused personalization, which can be a lot of work.
People will often win or lose before they even start. Their negativity, self-doubt, and anticipation of failure become a self-fulfilling prophecy. This post focuses on self-motivation, attitude, mindset, and creating the habits that lead to better success.
Below are four simple questions that someone should ask themselves when they question their ability to succeed in a position, company, or industry. There are always many ways to point the finger of blame elsewhere, but the first step should be to look in the mirror.
- Do you believe that you can win where you are today? If not, why are you still there? Customers and prospects can sense insincerity, so if you don’t believe in yourself, you shouldn’t expect them to believe in you. Maybe the company is terrible, and everyone is failing. If that is true, then it is probably time to look elsewhere.
- What have you learned from past successes and failures, and how have you adapted based on those lessons learned?
- What are some early indicators of success or failure that you have identified? Are you adapting to the situation if you run into those indicators now? The best approach may be to cut your losses on this attempt and move to the next sooner rather than later (i.e., qualify out quickly).
- What are you doing to improve your skills? It is funny how small, continuous improvement efforts lead to a greater sense of confidence. Greater confidence often translates to increased success.
I have found that consistently doing the right things is the best way to maximize my success. Start developing habits and routines that have led to winning in the past, but don’t expect them to work forever. Everything changes, and you should change, too. Look for what’s working for others, try it out, and if it works, incorporate it into your routines.
Success truly is a mental game, and everyone can win. The person who keeps winning over time is the one who doesn’t get stuck in time. Be curious, get excited, and adapt. And once you get there, start helping others. Having mentors is nice, but it is also great to become one.
As the saying goes, the rising tide lifts all boats. Winning can be a team sport, but it begins with individual contributors having winning attitudes. Unfortunately, the same is true of losing, so decide now what you want and move forward with energy and confidence.
Acting Like a Startup
Over the years, I have heard comments like, “We operate like a startup,” “We act like a startup,” and “We are an overnight success that was 10 years in the making.” These statements are often euphemisms for “We are small and not growing as quickly as we would like.”
There are numerous estimates of startup and failure rates in their first few years. One of the best descriptions I have found is from Failory. Investopedia and LendingTree have similar but differing takes on the statistics and root causes. The net result is that failure is much more common than success, especially over time. So, “acting like a startup” is not necessarily good, even when true. Instead, you want to “act like a successful startup!“
Understanding the various causes and the data on success and failure should become significant inputs to business plans focused on long-term success. As a Founder, there are several points that I believe to be key to success:
- You have specific expertise that is in demand and would be valuable to an identifiable number of prospective customers. How would those customers use those skills, and how would they quantify the value? That understanding provides focus on what to sell and to whom.
- A detailed understanding of the market and key players is needed to hone in on a niche to succeed.
- Understand your strengths and weaknesses, then hire the most intelligent and ambitious people who complement your weaknesses and strengths.
- Understand how to reach those potential customers and the messaging you believe will compel them. Find a way to test and refine those assumptions as necessary – before you go all in. Remember, Marketing and Lead Generation are very important but also expensive, so it pays to get this right the first time.
- Have a plan for delivering on whatever you sell before you get your first sale. A startup needs to develop its track record of success, beginning with its first sale.
- Cash flow is king. It is far too easy to run out of money while looking at an excellent balance sheet because of receivables. Understand what matters and why.
- Founders need to understand the administrative side of a business – especially the financial, legal (especially contract law), insurance, and taxes. Find experts to validate your approach and fill in knowledge gaps.
- Consistency leads to repeatable success. You standardize, optimize, and automate everything possible. Wasted time and effort become wasted opportunities.
- Finally, there needs to be sufficient cash on hand to fund the time it takes to find and close your first deals, deliver and invoice the work, and then receive your first payments. That could easily be a 3-6 month period.
Those are the foundational items that are reasonably tangible. What is not as concrete but equally as important are:
- Having or developing the ability to spot trends early and identify gaps that could become opportunities for your business.
- An agile mindset allows you to pivot your offerings or approach in order to refine your business model and hone in on that successful niche. Don’t fall into a sunk-cost fallacy.
- Foster a sense of innovation within your business. Always look for opportunities to deliver a better product or service, improve the efficiency and effectiveness of your business, and create intellectual property (IP) that adds long-term value.
- Focus on being the best and building a brand that helps differentiate you from your competition.
- Become a Leader, not a Manager (lead people, manage processes). Create your vision of success, set expectations for each person and team, and help eliminate roadblocks to their success. Trust your team to help you grow and replace members quickly if it becomes clear they are not a good fit.
Steve Jobs once said, “It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.” To grow, you need to choose the best people you can afford, guide them, and trust them to perform in the best interest of your company. That is true in any size organization.
Winning is hard, so focus on the journey. Making your customers’ lives easier and allowing your employees to be creative while doing something they are proud of will lead you to your destination. But when things start going well, don’t sit back and convince yourself you are successful. Instead, feel the pressure of the competition – they are out there – and continue to focus on ways to improve and grow.
Success means different things to different people, but longevity, growth, profitability, and some form of contributing to the greater good should be dimensions of success for any vision.
Never Panic!
Panic is never a good problem-solving tool, regardless of your position or role. It is especially bad when you are in charge of people or brought in for your expertise. Panic leads to a myopic view of the problem, hindering creativity and fostering dread.
The point in my career when this became readily apparent was when I was working for a small software company. We had a new product (Warehouse Management System) and were launching our third deployment. This one was more complicated than the rest because it was for a pharmaceutical company. In addition to requirements like refrigeration and lot control, there was a mix of FDA-controlled items requiring various forms of auditing and security, and storage areas significantly smaller than previous installations (think small packages of medicine versus pallets of one product). It was a challenge, to be sure.
A critical component, “Location Search,” failed during this implementation. About 10-12 people were in the “war room” when my boss, the VP of Development, began to panic. He was extremely talented and normally did an excellent job, but his reaction negatively affected the others in the room. The mood quickly worsened.
I jumped in and took over because I didn’t want to be stuck there all weekend, and because I wanted this implementation to succeed. I asked my boss to go out and get a bunch of pizzas. Next, I organized a short meeting to review what we knew and what differed from our prior tests, and I asked for speculation about the root cause. The team came up with two potential causes and one potential workaround. Everyone was organized into three teams, and we began attacking each item independently and in parallel.
We identified the root cause, which led to an ideal fix a few days later and a workaround that allowed us to finish the user acceptance testing and go live the following day. A change in mindset fostered the collaboration and problem-solving needed to move forward.
But this isn’t just limited to groups. I was a consultant at a large insurance company on a team redesigning their Risk Management system. We were using new software and wanted to be sure that the proper environment variables were set during the Unix login process for this new system. I volunteered to create an external function executed as part of the login process. To keep the code clean, I added an “exit” at the end of the function. It worked well during testing, but once it was placed into production, the function immediately logged people out as they attempted to log into the system.
As you can imagine, I had a sinking feeling in my gut. How could I have missed this? This was a newer system deployed just for this risk management application, so no other privileged users were logged in at the time. Then, I remembered reading about a Unix “worm” that used FTP to infiltrate systems. The article stated that FTP bypassed the standard login process. This allowed me to FTP into the system and then delete the offending function. In less than 5 minutes, everything was back to normal.
A related lesson learned was to make key people aware of what happened, noting that the problem was resolved and there was no lasting damage. Hiding mistakes kills careers. Then, we created a “Lessons Learned” log, with this as the first entry, to foster the idea of sharing mistakes to avoid them in the future. Understanding that mistakes can happen to anyone is a good way to get people to plan better and keep them from panicking when problems occur.
Staying calm and focused on resolving the problem is a much better approach than worrying about blame and the implications of those actions. And most people appreciate the honesty.
As the novelist James Lane Allen stated, “Adversity does not build character; it reveals it.” Maintaining your composure and sense of calm (“equanimity”) makes chaos more manageable and helps develop resilience within the team. That is key to surviving in any high-pressure environment.
Using Themes for Enhanced Problem Solving
Thematic Analysis is a powerful qualitative approach used by many consultants. It involves identifying patterns and themes to better understand how and why something happened, providing context for other quantitative analyses. It can also be used when developing strategies and tactics because of its “cause and effect” nature.
Typical analysis tends to be event-based. Something happened that was unexpected. Some type of triggering or compelling event is sought to either stop something from happening or to make something happen. With enough of the right data, you may be able to identify patterns that help predict what will happen next based on past events. This data-based understanding may be simplistic or incomplete, but often it is sufficient.
But people are creatures of habit. If you can identify and understand those habits and place them within the context of a specific environment that includes interactions with others, you may be able to identify patterns within the patterns. Those themes can be much better indicators of what may or may not happen than the data itself. They become better predictors of things to come and can help identify more effective strategies and tactics to achieve your goals.
This approach requires that a person view an event (desired or historical) from various perspectives to help understand:
- Things that are accidental but predictable because of human nature.
- Things that are predictable based on other events and interactions.
- Things that are the logical consequence of a series of events and outcomes.
Aside from the practical implications of this approach, I find it fascinating relative to AI and Predictive Analysis.
For example, you can proactively monitor data, activities, and patterns by understanding recurring themes and triggers. That provides actionable intelligence that can be automated and incorporated into a larger system. Machine Learning and Deep Learning can analyze tremendous volumes of data from various sources in real-time.
Combine that with Semantic Analysis (and products like AllegroGraph) to harness the power of language through taxonomies and ontologies. The monitoring system would better understand what is happening (not just be aware of it), possibly determine how and why it happened, and result in even more focused and accurate predictions. Finally, include spatial and temporal data such as IoT, metadata from photographs, etc., and you should be able to view something as though you were very high up – providing the ability to “see” what is on the path ahead. It is obviously not that simple, but it is exciting.
This approach provides a multi-dimensional view of events and their causality, giving you the means to identify and prevent complex problems before they negatively affect a business.
Keeping these thoughts in mind will help you see details others have missed. Better tools can make for better analysis, better strategies, and better outcomes. Who wouldn’t want that?
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