Today there was a murder on our block. I was telling someone about it and they were shocked and asked me how I felt about it. I told them it was business as usual. After saying that I realized the statement had two meanings. We live in Los Angeles, crime happens. But also, business happens. I came into work to find police tape blocking my way. I had to go around the block to get into our parking lot. It was more of an inconvenience than anything else because I had emails to respond to, calls to make and meetings to attend to. Thinking about what went on only a few hundred yards from our front door, for a moment I felt some emotions, fear, concern, sorrow and the like. The feelings quickly subsided and I was soon determined to get down to business. We live in a world that is hardened by smarts of violent crimes and we endure. But we shine through our resolve to progress. It’s business as usual and I’m no exception.
I shrug to write this post, but I feel compelled to do it. My stomach has been in knots and my mind in torment for days. Really it’s sad to think such a superficial and monetary concern could impact me as it has. But why lie, it has, and I’m sick with anger and grief. I have no control and little ability to affect the outcome of a huge opportunity lost. In my heart I believe a difference could have been made; but complacency and satisfaction bent me and I hate it. I want to jump out of my seat and charm it into existence and I believe I could, but it is too late.
I rarely pat myself on the back. I’d say I’m self deprecating really, but certainly not typical. My approach isn’t written in a book, but my experience is that victory is rarely written, it’s conjured, it just happens. The magic is in carrying more than your own weight.
You can easily see how not having enough resources can stall growth; but I’ve noticed a phenomenon whereby your growth potential is actually limited by the resources of your organization. While it may be obvious that you can’t grow if you don’t have enough sales people or spend enough on marketing, what I mean is that the actual ceiling, the maximum growth that is even visible to you is limited. This occurrence not unlike the human subconscious; it’s there, it has an impact on you, but you can’t really see it or control it. It is the obscure wedge that blocks your organization from growing; the mere fact that you are resource limited drives opportunities elsewhere and you don’t even know it. You are essentially blind to what you could have gotten.
It’s not as if you have deals that you turn away or that choose to go with a competitor, it’s that these opportunities don’t even present themselves to you. You want to grow, and you might even add resources to take on a big new deal, but you miss out on the full potential of your organization. You don’t even have the opportunity to add resources because you don’t know you even need them. It’s what you don’t know, you don’t know, that you’re really missing, and that’s where the magic occurs in my experience. To access that growth opportunity you need to be a step ahead of it. Herein lies the balancing act. How do you balance adding resources for what you “might” have an opportunity to get, but you don’t know what those opportunities are, without overburdening your organization. How do you stay just slightly over-resourced? How do you have one too many staff? How do you set yourself up to be at the right place at the right time with the right resources? I’m trying to figure that out without either banging my head one too many times or worse, clubbing the heads of my current resources because they aren’t enough; sadly, I do both sometimes.
Many hours have been spent in board rooms strategizing over how to grow a business. Certainly America’s widely different companies and entrepreneurs have shown that there continue to be new ways to accomplish this. But I suspect a commonly debated growth strategy is whether or not to grow through iteration of the core, or through expansion outside of the box.
Iteration of the core means continuing to do what the company has proven it can do, what it does best, and typically what many on the team enjoys doing most. It doesn’t mean that you remain static. It doesn’t mean there is no innovation, quite the contrary. ITC is about finding new products, services, methods and systems to maximize what you already do. It means sticking to a proven business model and not introducing a massive disruption through the implementation of a new operational complexity. It means selling more to your current customers and finding new, bigger customers to sell what you’ve got. It means finding new ways to market your business and by adding staff and resource to “hit the gas”. Iteration of the core may be less risky than expanding outside the box. It may also be less likely to lead to an exponential jump in growth. But, if the market exists, it can provide a way for consistent, real growth and it creates story of repeatability and scalability. It may not be as sexy as inventing something revolutionary, but sexy doesn’t always sell so well. And, if you asked me, sexy is in the eye of the beholder.
As a follow-up to my last post about the importance of elegant solutions, I wanted to mention that, like anything, it can be taken too far. So the question is, what trumps elegance. The idea came to me at lunch today. I was at a famous Los Angeles sushi restaurant called Sasabune. The thing about this restaurant is that they have rules that cannot be broken. The owner is hardcore about what you can and cannot do. For example, there are no California rolls; NEVER! No take out, no way. The idea is that he wants his sushi to be a certain way. If you get take out, it’s ruined. The guy I was eating with told me a story of this very wealthy business man that frequents the place and became quite friendly with the owner. He wanted to have the sushi for his office, which was literally across the street. He offered a lot of money for it; more than 10x the cost of the sushi. Of course Sasabune said no dice! That’s commitment to elegance. But I think from my perspective elegance can be trumped in certain circumstances. Such circumstances differ from situation to situation, but here are a few examples.
First, when the elegant solution is just so much work for so little reward; in other words, its big time overkill. Sometimes you can come up with a very elegant solution that is just a waste of time, in these cases I’d probably give way on the importance of elegance. A second example is revenue; at some point revenue trumps elegance, maybe not for the Sasabune owner as my story above makes clear, but at least in my book. I know there are some people that will debunk that, but when you’re in a growth business like me, sometimes revenue just wins. It’s the age old balance between form and function.
If you work with me you’ve probably heard me use this term a lot lately; I’m a bit obsessed, but for good reason. I realized recently that I drive a lot of decisions by the elegance of the solution. In particular, when it comes to software, I’m very hesitant to implement something that doesn’t gel. More than once I’ve been poked for being anal. Yet I think my commitment to finding solutions that work and those that are elegant have a very positive impact on business.
To me an elegant solution is one that jives with everything it touches. In software, whenever a new piece of functionality is introduced it can have an impact on many existing features or clients. When I flush out how a new feature should work, I spend a great deal of time on how it will align with the existing functionality it touches. I think about how to re-use existing interface or user experience. I regularly ask my engineers, where have we done something like that before, in an attempt to match existing layout.
This discipline extends beyond software development. When I’m evaluating a partnership or potential vendor you can be sure I’m thinking about how their cogs fit in with ours. I want to work with other companies that think about elegance like I do.
Of course I can go overboard, like anything. I’ve definitely been pushed to make a decision taking function over form. But when it comes to making decisions, if I have a rigid process to look for the most elegant solution possible, while not compromising quality or results, I know I will make a good one.
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