Sustainable Startup

Give Away What You've Learned In Support of Prosperity

“In today's environment, hoarding knowledge ultimately erodes your power. If you know something very important, the way to get power is by actually sharing it.”

- Joseph Badaracco

A startup is an organization that has created something great from a simple concept. You’ve taken your team and idea, approached it tenaciously while keeping your passions in perspective and grown it into a Sustainable Startup with a team that is able to communicate and scale together. While being poised to grow and able to scale are important for any startup, for a Sustainable Startup giving away what you’ve learned is a priority.

The immediate concern that arises tends to be about trade secrets or competitive advantages you’ve created during your startup’s run. There are certain things which will probably remain inside your business, after all Google doesn’t readily display its algorithms to its competitors. However sharing your knowledge, tactics and strategies creates a community around your startups and feeds experience down through the entrepreneurial ecosystems. We believe there are five primary reasons that as a startup you should give away what you’ve learn in support of prosperity.

1) If you’ve created a successful, Sustainable Startup, creation is your first instinct, not hoarding.

The first instinct for creative individuals is to share their creations and continue to innovate. Artists don’t produce their works and keep them to themselves, writers don’t write novels and hide them away in safes, their instinct is to share what they’ve accomplished and continue to create. Creation in startups is no different, many of the most prominent startups and entrepreneurs are those that have immersed themselves in the cycle of creation, completion, sharing and creation.

2) Hoarding is the same as admitting you can’t do it again.

Giving away what you’ve learned, and sharing your experiences means you can accept the challenge of starting again with an even playing field. By contributing your knowledge to the startup ecosystem you are proving to yourself that you are capable repeating your successes.

3) You are not operating in secret.

Especially in the era of Web 2.0 very little is secret and even less remains that way for long. As we’ve mentioned in earlier Principles there are no new ideas, simply different perspectives and to assume your project or projects are secret and unique is misguided.

4) Innovation always evens the playing field.

Innovation happens at such an incredible rate that any perceived advantages on one day can easily be erased the next. Share your ideas and techniques openly and be prepared not only to offer insight, but to be offered great insight by other startup entrepreneurs.

5) Teaching creates new perspectives.

By sharing your knowledge and techniques you are accepting any questions that may come forward. Unwanted questioning can often create a defensive state of mind which closes the door to further creativity. Teaching what you know and accepting questions or criticisms allows you to see new perspectives and apply it in new ways.

Giving away what you’ve learned supports startup industries, communities and most importantly, your next venture.

Do What It Takes

Step Two: Do What It Takes

“The price of greatness is responsibility.”

- Winston Churchill

   Failing fast is the credo of the lean startup movement. The thought that when you fail individually or as a startup you need to pick yourself up as quickly as possible and move forward, which isn’t what “failing fast” means at all. While it does imply that you shouldn’t rest on your laurels and wait for the next revelation to come out of thin air, what it is really trying to tell you is that you should fail smart.

Take the time to understand why you failed but use that time effectively. Be smart about it. Failing fast, or failing smart, means examining why whatever mistakes were made, were made and how the problems can be fixed. To do this we suggest breaking your analysis of the situation down into five steps.

1) Look at what wasn’t achieved or where the mistakes were made.

Take the time to examine exactly where the mistakes occurred and write them down. When you are looking into mistakes it is crucial to drill down as deep as possible and not just skim the surface. Deep problems can become systemic and bring down more than a single area of your startup.

2) Prioritize your top three

Chances are that when you begin to drill down into your problems or the mistakes that were made you’ll begin to notice that there were either many, or offshoots of a single mistake. By prioritizing your top three mistakes you aren’t saying the other identified aren’t important and shouldn’t be resolved, rather that the three you’ve selected should be solved first.

3) Why could these goals not be hit?

As a team sit down and examine each of the three mistakes individually by asking why it could not be hit. Be careful not to place blame by asking “why was this goal not hit”, as you’ve already acknowledged mistakes and are now working to move forward.

4) What is the new goal?

Now that you’ve taken the time to understand exactly where the mistakes were and why they could not be hit, it’s time, as a team, to decide what your next steps are. Using your learning from why your previous goals could not be hit will help you to develop strategies for creating and hitting new goals.

5) What needs to be done, by when, to achieve this goal by who?

Now that tasks have been created, responsibility needs to be assigned within the team. Part of acknowledging mistakes is accepting where responsibilities are going to lay. Take time as a team to structure timeframes and measurements to help accomplish the new goals you have set. 

If you want more information on a framework to do this, check out www.businessinstincts.ca and click on Clarity Management and the RIPKIT Process.

Acknowledging Mistakes in a Sustainable Startup

Principle 5 - Step One

 “A man should never be ashamed to own that he is wrong, which is but saying in other words that he is wiser today than he was yesterday.”

- Alexander Pope

Startups fail perhaps more than any other business. Not to say that they aren’t or won’t be successful businesses in their own rights, but that the opportunity for failure, regardless of scale, exists far more frequently than anywhere else. However within that area of possible and frequent failure is a tremendous space available for growth, if startups are open to it.

Failing and learning from failures are two entirely different things and what invariably separates the successful businesses to those that succumb to failure. There is however a level of humility that is required to bridge the gap between learning and failing and acknowledging your mistakes, both personally and as an organization is the first step. Creating a culture of accountability in your startup, which is part of the sustainable startup model, means taking responsibility for the mistakes that were made in projects and learning how to grow from them.

1) Being wrong is not wrong.

Overcoming the misconception that being wrong is bad requires a fair amount of humility within an organization. While people would clearly rather be right than wrong, making mistakes is an inevitable part of life and work. You will never get it right 100% of the time, it’s simply not possible. Taking the stance that mistakes are an opportunity to grow and learn as opposed to a time for blame and escaping accountability will help your organization grow.

2) Fail fast

Accepting that it is okay to be wrong and okay to fail are important steps for this Principle, but so is keeping your momentum moving. When you fail there is an overwhelming urge to take time to lick your wounds and recover, to rest on your laurels and let the entirety of the situation sink in before moving forward again.

What this does is lessen the impact that your failings have. It not only takes away the sting of the mistakes, but the energy to move forward as well. As children we were told to pick ourselves up off the ground, dust off our knees and try again which is exactly the point of failing fast. Don’t mull over your mistakes or failings, pick yourself up, find solutions, rectify your mistakes and attack it hard. Step Two of this Principle will outline some exercises that we recommend to do what it takes to turn your failures into successes.  

Principle Five: Acknowledge Mistakes And Do What It Takes

“Our greatest strength as a human race is our ability to acknowledge our differences, our greatest weakness is our failure to embrace them.”

- Judith Henderson

Failure within a startup is a fairly frequent occurrence. The important piece of that statement is not that failure happens often, rather that the opportunity to learn and grow exists more in startups than it does anywhere else. Early stage companies and startups must grasp the ideology that being right is not the objective, but learning from their failures and mistakes is.               

Acknowledging mistakes in a startup is often a practice of stepping away from your ego. Where startups are by nature small groups of people working very closely together a skewed sense of responsibility can easily develop. Team members may begin to assume credit for successes and place blame away from themselves when a project results in a failure.

Removing egos from a situation helps all those involved see not only where they can improve, but how the team can be strengthened as well.

We’ve broken Principle Five down into Two Steps:

1) Acknowledge Mistakes

2) Do What It Takes

Measuring to Keep Your Passion in Perspective

Principle Four, Step Two: Measurement

“The only man who behaved sensibly was my tailor; he took my measurement anew every time he saw me, while all the rest went on with their old measurements and expected them to fit me.”

- George Bernard Shaw

Measurement is an extension of alignment. It is the next necessary step to keep passion in perspective and egos in check. It is often said that if something cannot be measured, then it isn’t truly real and without measurement, the clarity and alignment you have achieved through step one will be ineffective if useful at all.

The ability to measure your How in a startup is effectively how you will gauge your successes, failures and learnings. In this case what you will be looking to measure is your What. In other words, what do you do, and what will you be doing to accomplish your How.

In businesses finances and goals are generally tracked on a quarterly basis and we don’t for a second suggest deviating from that. Quarterly reporting and tracking of goals allows for companies, managers and team members to understand what they are doing while at the same time seeing how it is important to the company. Taking the time to measure goals on ninety day cycles allows team to compensate and alter their directions when they discover something isn’t working or when new opportunities present themselves.

Measurement however isn’t just about reporting and gauging at the end of ninety days, it involves an incredible amount of diligence. To effectively measure yourself and others you need to know specifically what you will be working on or towards and be comfortable measuring your progress on a weekly basis. A method we have found effective for doing this is to complete the following process twice, once for setting the goals of the team and a second time to set the individual goals of the team members to have them effectively work towards accomplishing those set for the team.

1: Write it down

As you should with all brainstorming sessions, get it written down.  Whether this is for setting team or individual goals, start writing. The easiest way to get ideas flowing, especially ideas that fall in line with the company goals is to start writing and brainstorming.

By doing this you are not only increasing your understanding of the direction the team or individuals are going, but they are helping themselves as well. The important thing to remember is to always set a measurement guideline with every action.

If your action is to “Give Funding Presentations” there has to be a measureable quality to the action. Whether that is “Give Ten Funding Presentations” or “Give Ten Funding Presentations by May 1”. If you are proactive in your measurements and meet on a weekly basis, these types of quantitative measurements allow you to track and gauge your progress.

2: Vote it through

This isn’t to say all the tasks and goals you’ve written down aren’t important, but the vote it through process will allow you to determine what will be the top three goals you’ll be working toward over the next quarter.

This process of voting through (done either with the entire team or as individuals) helps to determine the focus of your goals.  By selecting and voting as a team you are allowing the clarity and alignment practices you’ve done earlier to come to fruition.

For setting team goals, have each member of the team select which three goals they believe are the most important, by attaching point values to them (3 for most important, 2 for second most important and 1 for third most important). To determine the top three goals, add up all the votes and the goals with the three highest point scores become your objectives. For Individuals, have them select their top three goals from all those listed. This allows individual team members to suggest and hopefully decide their goals for the next ninety days, goals that should fall in line with the goals set by the team, for the team.

Creating Clarity & Alignment

Principle 4 – Step 1

Keeping passion in perspective and ego’s in check is often like watching a sheepdog round up a flock of sheep. It requires absolute diligence at all times and the knowledge that sometimes, a little bite isn’t a bad thing but is in fact necessary.

Passion and tenacity can work hand in hand in a very synchronistic relationship. One feeds the other and constantly pushes its boundaries. Tenacity chasing Passion is almost as dangerous as Passion alone.  Tenacity drives startups while unbridled passion destroys them. Keeping both these triggers in check requires two very simple and always complex things: Clarity and Alignment.

Clarity:

Team and individuals need to know why they are doing what they’re doing. Whether its long term, short term or just daily tasks there needs to be a system in place that helps guide these actions. Clarity becomes about seeing how the actions of each team member affect the picture both big and little. Much the same way that Principle One is designed to determine a company’s Why, Step 1 helps to create the Why, How and What for each team member.

Why am I doing what I’m doing?

How am I going to get my “why” done?

What is the day to day result of what I do?

Having your team members ask these questions of themselves will help them achieve clarity within their position and in their actions. If you are having a “passion” or ego problem with a team member or partner, have  them do this exercise and review it in conjunction with the Why, How, and What or your Why, How and What and determine where you differ and how you can change for the better.

Alignment:

In Principle One alignment is encouraged through the creation of Personal Elevator Pitch (PEP) and while the PEP is effective for determining an individual’s role an extra step is required for helping keep the ego in check.

This extra step requires a lot of initial footwork to create a culture that allows for pushback from all employees.  Constructive conflict in a startup is used to pushback against ideas, not to discredit and necessarily dissuade but to get to the core of the idea itself.

Constructive conflict is a necessary measure to keep egos in check and passion in perspective in startups:

1: How is it currently done?

Gather your team or those having passion problems and sit down to discuss the situation. Write down How each member, or members specifically accomplish their PEP.

2: Is there a different way?

Have all members sit down and discuss other ways in which the How can be accomplished. This is a brainstorming session so let every idea get put up and discussed.

3: Vote it through:

After the brainstorming is done have each member of the team vote for their top three methods. Attach numbers to each idea, 3 for most valuable, 2 for second, 1 for least. After each member has voted add up the numbers to determine which is the agreed upon method of accomplish How.

When ideas are presented or suggested often there is a great deal of attachment to them. People tend to emotionally invest themselves in solutions or suggestions they have brought forward. This passion and attachment can become problematic when ideas are challenged. Creating situations of constructive conflict in which ideas are challenged removes the personal link between people and the ideas.

If passion can be removed and the focus can be placed on what the idea represents teams can effectively determine whether the idea is beneficial to your startup or not. 

Passion is the #1 Cause of Failure in Startups

Principle 4 – Passion is the #1 Cause of Failure in Startups

Entrepreneurs, especially startup entrepreneurs are notorious for their passion. There are few greater examples of people that believe so whole-heartedly in what they are doing than the startup investor. Most business writing you’ll read will probably tell you that are a good thing, that passion is the number one key to success in a startup. We propose that they are wrong in a very large way. We would even go so far as to say that passion is the number one reason for failure in startups.

Passion is an emotion built on attachment and ego. It’s a great emotion to have and essential to a startup, but is something that needs to kept and held in check. Uncontrolled passion is a sure a sign as any of an impending implosion. Startups that attach to their product or service with the knowledge that it is the ‘right’ way risk everything based on a bias. This attachment and emotional trigger forms a bias around the How of an idea, or startup, not the Why.

What is really being talked about is tenacity. Tenacity is the relentless, dogged pursuit of your Why. As was talked about in Principle One, your idea isn’t that important. Getting caught up in How you do something will only serve to hamstring your success, but truly understanding your Why will allow you pursue that goal with relentless doggedness.

If you want to truly embrace your tenacity and keep your passion in check there are two steps we like to follow:

1) Clarity & Alignment

2) Measurement

Everything Out of Your Control

The third reality of a sustainable startup is one of common ground. After identifying the expectations you placed on a situation in your reality and then the expectations of others when trapped in their reality you are able to find where there was misalignment in expectations and reality.

Each reality seems right for those experiencing them. Your thoughts, emotions and rationalizations are all correct for you as you see them. This applies as well for others who are trapped within their own realities. For them how they see the situation around them is true. Every emotion, every thought and expectation is their unique view of the situation.

The purpose of the five questions found in each reality is to help accomplish two things. First to separate the emotion of your reality, or others realities from the expectations placed on yourself and others in the situation. Secondly these questions are used to create the foundations of alignment within your startup. To do this however there are a few steps that we have found worked best for us.

1) List the goals of the situation:

 With your team gathered, write down the goals you had been hoping to hit or the expectations you had in the situation. Once everything is out in the open you are able to do the following:

2) List what are the 3 most important things that need to get done to achieve our goals and who is responsible for each:

By narrowing the field of goals down to just the three most important you accomplish two things: First, you rid yourself of the excess goals that you and your team have just decided are not as important to the end goal as the others. Secondly you create alignment within your team by saying “these are the goals we’re working towards, and we all decided their importance.”

3) List how you know the 3 most important things are done:

 Now that you’ve taken the time to examine what is and isn’t in your control, and what goals are truly relevant to the situation, you have to measure them. The important step here is to measure these goals, and what you are doing to achieve them on a weekly basis, while being completely honest. Often we want to exaggerate our progress but it is important that team members push back when an answer is given to find the reasoning. 

I will be speaking in a webinar this thursday (March 31) about Valuations in Startups, hope you can make it.

Understanding The Reality Of Others

Step Two: Your Reality

“There are no facts, only interpretations.”

- Friedrich Nietzsche

The idea behind understand Your Reality (as in someone else’s reality) is to take a personal responsibility in finding their truth. Where Step One focuses on discovering your own truth and reality, Step Two is about discovering where the reality of others begins.

This is often done and best accomplished by placing yourself in a position of vulnerability and trust. Having already understood where and why your reality exists, placing yourself this position helps to understand the reasoning and dissatisfaction of others.

To help others, pass along your answers to the Five Questions in Step One and ask the other members of the team to answer the same Five Questions below. Sharing your answers to the Five Questions will help to share your level of commitment to solving the problems at hand.

While the questions are being answered by other team members, it’s important to remember that realities, no matter how aligned, will always be different. Any of the realities presented will not be real, but interpretations of events.

1) How do I see the current situation?

Ask yourself this question first and allow all your biases to bleed through. While the question may not be answerable immediately, you will be able to see where you believe the problems or conflicts are coming from.

2) What part of the situation frustrates me?

By answering this question you are able to examine not only what it is that frustrates you, but how it frustrates you as well. Recognizing where the distress is located in the conflict means you can identify where your biases are strongest.

3) What were my expectations of myself and how did I meet them?

In every situation we encountered every day of our lives we place expectations on ourselves and others. These expectations in turn shape our view of a situation. By enabling yourself to see your successes and failures in a situation, or even how the expectations you placed on yourself were unreasonable, you are beginning to take yourself out of your reality.

4) What were my expectations of others and how did they meet them?

Seeing your own biases in a situation means examining the expectations you placed on others and what you expected them to deliver. By giving yourself the ability to see where expectations were in the situation and what the reality of the situation allowed you are once again giving yourself the ability to see and understand your biases.

5) How do I see the current situation?

Now that you have delved deeper into your understanding of the conflict and given yourself the ability to see where your biases were and how they affected your expectations ask yourself this question again.  This time use some of the realizations you’ve experienced throughout the previous questions to shape your understanding of the situations, free from your original rationalizations.

What Is Your Reality?

Principle Three - Step One: