Why are the best ideas often the ones that don’t seem to make sense? Bestselling author Adam Grant, one of the most influential management thinkers in America, recently came to Stanford to give a talk that was chock-full of counterintuitive tips for anyone seeking to be a better business leader — citing scholarly research and case studies from his 2016 book “Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World.”
1. Bosses Have It Backwards
The saying “don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions” means no one asks the toughest questions. Instead of a culture of advocacy, Grant says managers should foster an environment of inquiry in order to spur innovation.
2. Imagine How to Kill Your Company
Thinking of competitive threats could reveal big business opportunities. Call a meeting and invite everyone to share ideas for how to kill the company. Grant says vulnerabilities may be the seeds of growth.
3. Beat Haters to the Punch
Lead with your flaws and turn skeptics into problem solvers. An entrepreneur begins his pitch to investors by giving three reasons why they shouldn’t give him their money, and then walks away with $3.2 million in funding. Here’s why.
4. Hire for Culture Fit or Culture Add?
It depends on whether you’re a small startup or a big business. The shared values that fuel a venture in the beginning can slow growth once it goes public and requires more diversity of thought, Grant explains.
5. Let Your Mind Drift Before the Meeting
Studies show that bosses might be in a better headspace to evaluate an employee’s idea if they take a few minutes beforehand to think about something completely different. Grant describes how a quick brainstorm can wash away the negativity that often clouds a manager’s judgment.
Watch Grant’s entire talk at the Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Seminar.
Today, technology entrepreneurship and the arts are often characterized as clashing forces in society. As tech startups proliferate in a city, we hear the familiar cry that gentrification will sterilize the creative and artistic soul of the community – and that rising housing costs will put artists out on the street.
But both disciplines play a crucial role in shaping our world, so wouldn’t it be better to start from a place of empathy, rather than rivalry? Artists and entrepreneurs have so much in common: Each discipline requires creativity and vision to bring an idea to life, and whether you’re a musician or a technologist, without passion you’ve got nothing. Even the underlying strategies and satisfaction felt from a dream realized are similar.
Take Meow Wolf, a Santa Fe-based art collective and production company. It started as a group of artists with a desire to create a space to host music shows, make art, and be expressive in their community. As their installations started gaining traction, the artists began looking for a way to support the collective financially, which was the beginning of their journey into the world of scalability and entrepreneurship.
Spider sculpture ‘TaranTula’ by Christina Sporrong at the Meow Wolf Art Complex in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
“As artists, we emerged as entrepreneurs largely because we were looking for alternatives to the traditional art world model,” said Sean Di Ianni, co-founder and chief operating officer at Meow Wolf. “What fueled our ability to make opportunities for ourselves was both a sense of strength in numbers and also a real enjoyment of the unpredictability of working collaboratively.”
Furthermore, Di Ianni’s experience as an artist helped prepare him for the world of uncertainty that startup founders often face: “As an artist I always seem to be solving strange or unexpected problems to push my work forward. I think the work I’ve done in building a business is an extension of that process of propelling myself into unknown creative territory.”
More similar than not
In one of his blog posts, entrepreneurship educator Steve Blank begins by presenting two kinds of artists: composers and performers, where the former are the ones who create and latter are those who execute that creative vision. “Founders fit the definition of a composer: they see something no one else does. And to help them create it from nothing, they surround themselves with world-class performers,” Blank writes.
“This concept of creating something that few others see – and the reality distortion field necessary to recruit the team to build it – is at the heart of what startup founders do,” he continues. “It is a very different skill than science, engineering, or management.”
Blank’s colleague, Stanford Professor Tom Byers, concurs. The holder of the Entrepreneurship Professorship endowed chair in the university’s engineering school, Byers has taught students the art and science of technology venture formation for over 20 years – drawing from his faith in higher education and experience in the startup world before coming to academia.
When he first graduated, however, Byers was a guitarist for several touring blues bands. He performed in over 100 gigs, all in his 20s, and yet can still easily see the similarities between being a musician and an entrepreneur. “To me, they bring the same sort of joy. When performing, I felt in flow, I felt joy, I felt like I was having impact,” Byers said. “Putting together a band and making a living – the feeling that I was doing something I was born to do, that’s the same feeling I got when I decided to pursue entrepreneurship and academia.”
Beyond these feelings of individual joy and passion, Byers explains that the two biggest components of innovation – creativity and teamwork – are the foundation of both music and entrepreneurship.
“Innovation in both music and technology entrepreneurship is rooted in creativity and teamwork. Finding the harmony between creativity and teamwork, and developing a culture and a mindset that cultivates both of those things, is essential,” said Byers, a faculty director at the Stanford Technology Ventures Program (STVP). “If you have one and not the other, you have no impact. That’s absolutely the case, whether you’re performing with a band or creating a company as a startup team.”
Arts and tech in higher education
Stanford is a familiar theater in this supposed war for relevance, with much ink spilled in the debate over whether the emphasis on a liberal-arts education has been overshadowed by Silicon Valley’s need for technical innovators. The university has launched numerous interdisciplinary initiatives in recent years that have brought arts and humanities departments closer to engineering, but even at the level of individual faculty members, the spirit of mutual respect is obvious.
Rich Cox, a lecturer at Stanford in the engineering school and Graduate School of Business, takes the intersection of art and science to heart in his own venture, a management-design firm he founded.
“We think there is something magical about the intersection of the research and theory from academics, the embodied learning from the arts, and the practical application from business,” Cox said. “Academics organize knowledge into usable frameworks, the arts thrive in giving elegant answers to ambiguous questions, and business grounds theory and expression giving concrete results.”
Art is innovation
Indeed, unique disciplines can literally go hand in hand. In his book The Innovators, Walter Isaacson explains how no less than Leonardo DaVinci, Albert Einstein and many other geniuses engaged deeply with both the arts and sciences at the peak of their inventiveness – themselves citing this interplay as the reason for their success as innovators.
“When Einstein was stymied while working out General Relativity, he would pull out his violin and play Mozart until he could reconnect to what he called the harmony of the spheres,” Isaacson writes.
Perhaps the best example of arts and startup communities coming together is the emergence of incubators outside the high-tech sector. Alice Loy, co-founder of Creative Startups, founded the company in 2007 because she realized the potential for innovation in the often-overlooked creative population.
“For a long time, there’s been this falsehood perpetuated that artists struggle with business,” Loy said. “What I would argue is that artists bring a unique perspective and creativity that allows them to see market opportunities before others see them, and then go after these opportunities in a unique and defensible way.”
Beyond their innate entrepreneurial abilities, “creatives” also have ideas and perspectives that Loy believes benefit society in the long run. She mentions data showing that entrepreneurs make social change happen. This begs the question: Who are the chosen entrepreneurs who get to shape the future? What kind of world do you want to see?
Loy adds that given how creative expression such as art, music and film are the foundation of the communities we all love to live in, we should invest in artistic entrepreneurs to build more of the world that we want to live in.
Back in Santa Fe, Meow Wolf seems to be a positive example of what happens when these types of entrepreneurs do get a chance to shape the world. “People of all ages and many walks of life have reacted with overwhelming positivity to what we’ve done with our first permanent installation,” Di Ianni said. “This is in part because people crave raw, unique, expressive experiences just as much as artists crave a place to be expressive.”
If you’re going to lead the lab that launches moonshots like self-driving cars and balloon-powered Internet, you need to be incredibly ambitious and intelligent. But that will only get you so far. It turns out you also need courage and confidence in the people around you.
Those sentiments came up again and again when the director of Alphabet’s moonshot factory, X, spoke at Stanford on April 20 as part of the DFJ Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Seminar series. The geniuses inside the secretive lab at the Googleplex in Mountain View are encouraged to identify every possible reason why an incredibly ambitious idea won’t fly, as soon as it’s been thought — and certainly before costly brainpower and other resources are committed.
The teams celebrated most fondly at X aren’t the ones that complete their projects, according to Astro Teller, director at X. He says the teams that kill their moonshots before they even see the light of day are the true rockstars. This is how the Silicon Valley mantra “fail fast” is lived, and not just given lip service.
“This is the difference,” said Teller, who earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Stanford University’s computer science department before getting his Ph.D. studying artificial intelligence at Carnegie Mellon University. “Creating the feeling that failing fast would actually get you what you want, instead of getting you the opposite of what you want.”
Teller gave a similar TED talk in February titled “The unexpected benefit of celebrating failure.” But his discussion at Stanford allowed him to go deeper and engage the audience with an insightful question-and-answer session at the end.
More than any of the moonshots that his factory is known for, Teller said he is most excited about “systematizing innovation.” He does this by creating a work environment where employees are encouraged to be audacious, and by giving them the freedom to work on ideas that inspire them and that they want to own — whether they fail or succeed.
In addition to the self-driving car and Google Glass, other well-known innovations out of X include Project Loon, which is providing Internet access through stratospheric balloons, and Project Wing, a fleet of next-generation drones intended to deliver goods ranging from consumer products to emergency medicine. And yet, X also drops ideas by the dozens every year. Some projects that X has famously pulled the plug on include a space elevator, a jet pack and vertical farming.
Those projects were not fruitless, though. Teams within X taking them on meant there was some potential for a breakthrough, because those working on the projects wouldn’t be there in the first place if they didn’t possess both intelligence and integrity. That’s where the confidence in others comes into play.
“I’m not pro-failure. I’m pro-learning,” Teller said. “We mean find incredibly efficient ways to learn.” Calling himself a “culture engineer,” Teller also explained that good ideas can come from anywhere, and that the positivity that results from such optimism must be protected in order to fuel real creativity, audacity and honesty without fear of reproach.
At one point in his talk, Teller described how the audaciousness of an idea for generating electricity once shared in Alphabet’s moonshot factory far outweighed its impracticality in his mind. He then sums up the decision-making process at X for whether or not to put resources behind a project, using the terms “false positives” and “false negatives.”
In this context, a false positive is when an idea is thought to be worth the time and effort, but ends up not going anywhere despite all the trouble. A false negative, Teller explained, is when an idea is considered unworthy of resources and passed up, when in reality it could’ve been a major breakthrough. He said a false positive is much more costly than a false negative for X — or for any innovation factory.
Toward the end, Teller addressed a question from the audience about how other organizations could possibly create a culture that incentivizes bold failures if they don’t have Alphabet’s deep pockets. To that, Teller pointed to all the research showing that salary increases do not lead to long-term worker satisfaction.
“What people want is recognition,” Teller said. “You don’t need cash and you don’t need (job) promotions to do what I’m describing.”
Downtown San Jose, Calif. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons)
From humble beginnings known for its fruit orchards, Silicon Valley has transformed into the heartland of entrepreneurship and innovation in the United States. Each year hundreds of budding entrepreneurs from all over the world descend on Silicon Valley in search of the secret sauce. What makes this environment ripe for creativity and innovation? Can the environment be replicated in another country?
Charles Eesley, an assistant professor in the Department of Management Science and Engineering and at the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, has been studying the implications of institutional change for entrepreneurship in the United States, China and Japan. This week, a study by Eesley and collaborators Delin Yang, a professor at Tsinghua University, and Jian Bai “Jamber” Li, a doctoral student at Stanford, was published in Organization Science that analyzes the successes and failures of one of China’s primary efforts to encourage innovation.
The work looks specifically at Project 985, an educational reform program funded and implemented by the government of the People’s Republic of China and launched in 1998. It sought to foster a belief in the importance of innovation among students of 39 partner universities, with Tsinghua University and Peking University each receiving a current value of nearly $276 million. This funding provided new classes and programs on innovation and commercialization, recruitment of accomplished researchers from overseas institutions and corporations to teaching positions, construction of new facilities and acquisition of new equipment needed for advanced research.
Following is a Q&A with Eesley about his research:
What did your research reveal about innovation funding and outcomes in China?
Government funding provided additional resources both in classrooms and in the lab, and students graduating from the Project 985 universities were significantly more likely to create innovative, high-tech firms. However, when they commercialize their technologies in a startup, they find that innovating in a manner advocated by Project 985 negatively impacts firm financial performance.
How does Project 985 negatively impact firm performance?
It turns out that political networking results in better firm performance in the Chinese context. This is a counterintuitive result. From a U.S. perspective, you would expect the additional funding for research and development would lead to more innovative products that would result in better firm performance. The other institutions in the U.S. that are implemented to support startups, such as intellectual property and antitrust laws, are lacking in their enforcement in China. Also, state-owned enterprises are often favored and it often becomes difficult for a startup to compete against a state-owned enterprise no matter how innovative the product.
We found that those students influenced by Project 985 reform were less likely to engage in political networking and more likely to spend time and invest in research and development activities. They thought that the great technology that they developed was enough to succeed and they were actually spending time on activities not linked to better firm performance.
Shanghai skyline at night. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons)
How would you compare entrepreneurship in China to Japan and the United States?
A big part of my research is that environment shapes the type of entrepreneurship for a specific region. China, the U.S. and Japan all have very different cultural and institutional environments. The forms of entrepreneurship that you see are a reflection of the policies at each place.
Each of these markets is at a different stage of their development. In the Chinese market over the past decade, they have been going through a boom in manufacturing that the U.S. and Japan went through a couple of decades ago. The U.S. economy has moved more fully into services and the type of entrepreneurship that you see is focused on e-commerce, health care, financial services – and less about agriculture and manufacturing. The Japanese economy is also advanced. With their aging economy, low-end manufacturing is becoming more commoditized and moving into robotics and high-end manufacturing.
Some of the market struggles that we are seeing in the Chinese economy are a reflection of transitions taking place. The services industry is one of the fastest growing in China and manufacturing is slowing down.
The million-dollar question: Is there a formula for boosting innovation and entrepreneurship that can be replicated?
It is complicated and there are a lot of factors. There are institutional policies and culture, both of which take time. What we learn from this study is that sometimes changing just one policy in isolation is not effective and we need other complementary policies to be enforced as well.
For instance, Taiwan mimics U.S. policies. However there is something about the education system in the U.S. that allows students to be creative and think outside the box and do something different. To purely compete on efficiency and low cost is very difficult over time and you don’t gain the higher profit margin from offering a differentiated product or service.
You have to consider both the policies, and their correct implementation, and the cultural environment. Educational institutions have an important role to play as well both in technical education as well as in entrepreneurship education and informing policymakers. In the end, it’s a bit of copy and adapt depending on the local environment.
“Regardless of whether it’s a classroom or the offices of a billion-dollar company, space is something to think of as an instrument for innovation and collaboration,” Stanford d.school founder David Kelley says in the foreword for make space. “Space is a valuable tool that can help you create deep and meaningful collaborations in your work and life.”
The d.school — formally, the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford — teaches design thinking to graduate students in what many would consider a maker’s paradise in the middle of campus. The book make space chronicles the d.school’s experiences in designing its interior features, instructing readers how to replicate its unconventional furnishings and, just maybe, its extremely creative atmosphere.
We at STVP think a lot about space, too. Currently, our office is quite open, and everything in it — from the desks and chairs to the storage shelves — are movable. Over the summer, we plan to reconfigure our space in a way that will both continue to foster staff interaction and designate areas for the various activities that take place throughout the year.
We’ll share before-and-after photos later this summer on Facebook and Twitter. So be sure to follow us!
Staying Hungry and Humble
In the video clip below, Facebook’s engineering director, Jocelyn Goldfein, tells STVP Executive Director Tina Seelig about the unfinished ceilings, bare concrete floors and bold phrases — such as “Move Fast and Break Things” and “Fail Harder” — written all over the walls of the company’s headquarters.
“The entire environment is meant to keep you from feeling complacent, or comfortable, or like we’ve won,” Goldfein explained during her May 22 Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders talk. “We never want to feel like we’ve won. We always want to feel pretty hungry.”
Being Out in the Open
In this clip, Spotify Co-Founder Daniel Ek shares how he manages to lead a growing company with a workforce distributed on multiple continents. “I don’t think the physical experience can be replaced yet,” says Ek, who admits to traveling extensively and sitting out in the open to encourage conversations in his company’s offices.
Skipping Extravagance
In this conversation with entrepreneur Steve Blank, inDinero Co-Founder Jessica Mah offers a humorous story about the dangers of young startups moving into fancy office spaces. She described how one of the luxuries in hers included a hot tub — a particularly amusing admission to Blank, who invested in inDinero.
But Mah went on to say how inDinero then moved much closer to home: into an apartment down the hall from her own unit. “It’s cheaper,” she said. “Everyone’s in a small room together. So you really feel like you’re in it together.”
Our team at the Stanford Technology Ventures Program (STVP) is privileged to play a role in educating the next generation of entrepreneurs and innovators, preparing them to see the world as a place rich with opportunity and full of potential.
As the entrepreneurship program at Stanford’s School of Engineering, centered in the department of Management Science and Engineering, we see our job as helping students to gain the knowledge, skills and attitudes that are needed to turn the challenges around them into opportunities, and to build a better world. Whether they launch a startup, join an established company, or choose another path, these skills will be pivotal in helping them progress through their careers and to contribute to society.
[quote_right]Our philosophy is that it is no longer good enough for engineers and scientists to come out of school with purely technical training.[/quote_right]At STVP, our philosophy is that it is no longer good enough for engineers and scientists to come out of school with purely technical training. They must have the entrepreneurial skills needed to bring their ideas to life. This is important for them as individuals, for the companies they found or join, and for the nation as a whole. We do this by providing them with the knowledge they need as well as experiences that hone their skills. They graduate with an entrepreneurial mindset, fully understanding that the challenges they face are opportunities, and that as entrepreneurs their role is to do much more than is imaginable with much less than seems possible.
Since the earliest days of Stanford, the university has been building bridges between our research labs, classrooms, and Silicon Valley to create scalable ventures that fuel the local and national economy. An iconic example occurred as early as 1939 when Engineering Dean Fred Terman encouraged students William Hewlett and David Packard to launch a company to commercialize an audio oscillator based upon work that Hewlett had developed as a graduate student in Terman’s lab. Since then, Stanford has fostered the creation of an ever-growing list of technology companies, including Varian, Sun Microsystems, Cisco Systems, Yahoo, Rambus and Google. We would look forward to the bringing our knowledge and experience to New York City to help shape and support the local entrepreneurial ecosystem, built upon the unique resources and culture of the community.
Our work at Stanford is attracting recognition and support on a national level. For example, STVP was recently awarded a five-year grant to launch a national center dedicated to unleashing the entrepreneurial spirit in undergraduate engineering students across the country. This National Center for Engineering Pathway to Innovation, or Epicenter, will be connecting the nation’s 350 engineering schools with the goal of igniting interest in entrepreneurship and sharing best practices in entrepreneurship education.
The NSF has also asked Stanford to help leading scientists commercialize new technologies through their new Innovation Corps program. Teams from around the country, including faculty members and PhD students, are participating in an intense, 10-week program designed to help them discover and test scalable business models based upon their discoveries. The first cohort of 21 teams is participating in this program right now.
In all of our efforts, we will build upon our deep experience with online education. For the past ten years we have offered a free collection of materials on entrepreneurship that is both extensive and growing. Our ECorner website has thousands of videos and podcasts of entrepreneurial thought leaders, most of whom are from Silicon Valley. We look forward to expanding this collection with speakers from New York City. Along with other efforts, this will allow us to build strong ties to the New York City community of entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and company leaders.
[quote_right]To me, New York City is an amazing jewel, poised for entrepreneurial growth.[/quote_right]New York City holds a very special place in my heart. My parents both grew up, went to college, and worked in New York City, and I grew up in New Jersey. I spent endless hours in “The City,” taking full advantage of the world-class cultural environment that continues to thrive. To me, New York City is an amazing jewel, poised for entrepreneurial growth. My colleagues and I are extremely enthusiastic about the potential to contribute to Stanford’s efforts to build a New York City campus. We look forward to building a vital bridge between Palo Alto and New York City, between Stanford and Roosevelt Island, and between the present and the future.
There are many factors that can inhibit entrepreneurship from thriving in a particular region. Perhaps it’s lack of access to capital. Or maybe governments put up too many barriers to startup creation, either intentionally or unintentionally. The region may not have existing entrepreneurship models with which to inspire the next generation of growth. Even cultural or societal traditions may serve as roadblocks to innovation and a willingness to try new ideas.
In the following videos, successful entrepreneurs and political figures discuss a number of the specific challenges to entrepreneurship in Latin America.
High Friction and Weak Venture Capital Resources
While serial entrepreneur Wences Casares concedes startup success rates are low around the world, he argues that Latin America-based startups face additional challenges due to friction points in the regional ecosystem.
Fellow entrepreneur Meyer Malka explains why venture capital is “wired differently” in Latin America, and how venture support is different in Silicon Valley and Latin America. Casares also outlines an intriguing benefit to building talented technical teams in the developing world, indicating a possible advantage over Silicon Valley.
A Need for Reliable Institutions
Protego CEO Pedro Aspe believes greater amounts of education are necessary for entrepreneurship to flourish in a region. In this video from an Endeavor Entrepreneur Summit, Aspe also articulates why entrepreneurship can only grow in societies with reliable governmental institutions.
As a former secretary of finance in Mexico, Aspe emphasizes the importance of removing discretionary power, in matters of trade and finance, from the hands of public officials in order increase the reliability of an economic system.
Lack of Entrepreneurial Thinking and Education
Chilean science professors are not used to thinking in terms of startups, says Juan Andrés Fontaine, Chile’s Minister of Economy, Development and Tourism. In this video, STVP Executive Director Tina Seelig asks Minister Fontaine to identify skills that students should be developing to become better entrepreneurs, and what Chile’s universities are doing to address these needs.
Fontaine expresses his desire for students to take risks and learn to solve problems using an entrepreneurial frame of mind, and why this type of education can unlock economic growth and opportunities.
Prof. Tom Byers
In 2011-12, STVP will present an entirely new series of Accel Roundtable on Entrepreneurship Education (REE) conferences, in partnership with regional hosts on five continents. REE conferences bring together business, science, engineering and design faculty, with business and policy leaders, interested in building leading-edge entrepreneurship programs and ecosystems.
Someone who truly understands the power of these events is STVP Co-Director Tom Byers. As a dedicated entrepreneurship educator at Stanford’s School of Engineering, Byers is excited by the ever-growing wave of interest for entrepreneurship and innovation education around the world. Byers sat down with us to discuss the benefits of the REE conference experience and how each conference offers something unique for regional attendees.
__________________________________________________________________
New conference dates have been announced for the 2011-12 season. Where is REE headed this year?
Byers: Our schedule for the upcoming year is really fantastic. We are kicking things off in Puerto Rico, where Interamerican University will host REE Latin America in October. The 2010 REE Latin America conference was a packed house, so we’re excited to build on that success, this autumn, in San Juan. We also have upcoming REE conferences scheduled in Asia, Europe, the Middle East/North Africa region, and we will also hold REE USA in San Francisco, in partnership with the NCIIA’s OPEN conference in March.
How would you describe the REE conference experience?
Byers: Focused and collaborative. The educators and leaders from business and government who attend REE know these are very special gatherings. You get the chance to meet and work side by side with leaders in the field. You are surrounded by colleagues who are passionately committed to driving innovation and entrepreneurship education. And attendees leave with an infectious desire to be change-makers once they return home. Plus, REE conferences are intimate enough to offer attendees solid face-to-face time to network and build relationships with peers.
Is that intimate environment created by design?
Byers: It’s one we definitely encourage, and I think that each conference reflects this attitude to some extent. REE conferences are very interactive, with less emphasis on the presentation of scholarly papers than at traditional academic meetings. And each REE also has a unique character that reflects the host region’s culture and entrepreneurial ecosystem. We love to see new ideas presented at REE, and watch them be tested and examined through a region’s specific cultural lens.
Do you see similarities from region to region when it comes to entrepreneurship education?
[quote_right]Today’s educators want their research and coursework to have a sustaining power to affect change in the real world.[/quote_right]Byers: Absolutely. Every university would like to have deep impact within their local or national entrepreneurial ecosystem. At REE, we don’t see a lot of faculty or institutions solely interested in abstract or esoteric aspects of entrepreneurship. Today’s educators want their research and coursework to have a sustaining power to affect change in the real world.
What does change mean in this context?
Byers: It really depends, as entrepreneurial focus can vary from program to program. Some schools are looking to focus solely on training founders or being an incubator for their region. While this is not the purpose of our program at Stanford, we understand many international faculty are working within entrepreneurial ecosystems that are still early in their development, and with student populations with far less exposure and inherent inclination for the entrepreneurial life.
Can you describe a best-case example of experiential entrepreneurship learning?
Byers: At Stanford we try to infuse experiential learning into as many of our entrepreneurship and innovation courses as possible. This may be most evident in our Mayfield Fellows Program, which I have the sincere pleasure of teaching. Each spring a select group of our students take a deep dive into entrepreneurship through a series of classes and a hands-on internship in a developing technology company. This frontline exposure provides a lifetime of insights for the students.
Is it possible for faculty at other schools to build this type of program, particularly outside Silicon Valley?
[quote_right]I think it’s just as important, if not more so, for programs outside Silicon Valley to build course experiences that connect students to major technology firms in a region.[/quote_right]Byers: I think it’s just as important, if not more so, for programs outside Silicon Valley to build course experiences that connect students to major technology firms in a region. While we would encourage all students who have a desire to start their own companies, not everyone who takes entrepreneurship courses will end up founding a company or becoming a serial entrepreneur. However, entrepreneurship education provides broad skills that complement a technical education, which can then empower students to become innovative professionals in larger, established organizations, as well.
How should an entrepreneurially-minded faculty member go about developing a program?
Byers: A major key is for educators to identify the business, science and technology leaders who are successful in their home region. These leaders run the companies that can provide support and mentoring opportunities to get a program off the ground. Of course, designing a regionally-informed curriculum that fits the needs of the ecosystem is also a critical component. That’s why we started the Roundtable on Entrepreneurship Education conference series in 1998. At REE, educators can connect with one another and share the latest strategies and most-effective techniques for teaching entrepreneurship. The insights and tools you learn at REE can be put to work immediately.
“Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness.”
Human beings have an amazing ability to create assumptions. In fact, this ability is only trumped by the human race’s ability to rely on these assumptions as facts. The old adage goes, “you know what happens when you assume…,” however, you only risk embarrassment if you refuse to test your assumptions. In this collection of ECorner video insights, Tom Kelley, Ann Winblad and Randy Komisar explain the role assumptions play as starting points for entrepreneurs and, when left untested, as inhibitors to innovation.
Assumptions Blind You to New Products
As the general manager at design firm IDEO, Tom Kelley constantly sees clients anxious for new products. However, companies struggle to innovate when they can’t let go of industry assumptions about customers.
When IDEO was charged with helping a corporate client to design a new children’s toothbrush, Kelley’s team performed hands-on field research on how children actually brush their teeth. Blowing up tired assumptions about pint-sized users allowed IDEO to create a new bestselling product for their client.
Keep Testing Core Assumptions
“As time goes on, turn the assumptions into facts.”
Venture capitalist Ann Winblad advises entrepreneurs to boil down their business plan to identify the “top five core assumptions” for success. Particularly in the case of young startups, founders might make large changes to their product or service, often based on assumptions and incomplete evidence. This is an acceptable course of action, if the company is willing to constantly test these assumptions. “As time goes on, turn the assumptions into facts,” says Winblad.
Assumptions as Starting Points
Even though many ventures do not find success until discovering the pivot, KPCB Partner Randy Komisar sees the value of assumptions in an initial business plan. According to Komisar, any “Plan A” must flesh out your business assumptions, challenges and risk mitigation insights.
Those critical first thoughts on paper help an entrepreneur create the language with which to discuss their strategy. Here assumptions can serve as jumping off points for testing ideas and moving the organization forward.
Summertime for entrepreneurs means less time at barbecues and more time for business model generation. For those of you planning to spend the summer working on a venture, or developing the next great technology innovation, here’s a quick round-up of cool insights for you to use as you sweat out the hot weather. Of course, you could also make a business out of soaking up the sun.
Plus, enjoy this video of Le Meur sharing his entrepreneurial story at Stanford.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1G4w8EQ5LU
Large Scale Change Won’t be Easy
[quote_right]One of the impediments to successful change is that people use the belief that “it is difficult and takes a long time” to avoid trying to make necessary changes at all.
— Prof. Bob Sutton[/quote_right]Stanford Professor Bob Sutton is currently working on a new book, with colleague Hayagreeva Rao, on scaling constructive action. As the author of Good Boss, Bad Boss and The No Asshole Rule, Bob is widely known for engaging work that consistently presents valuable insights into human and team interaction, particularly in the workplace.
Earlier in June, Sutton shared a post on his blog discussing the direction of his current thinking, and examined earlier research on why organizations cannot always achieve large scale change through simplification of processes to reduce cognitive load on employees. Read the full post Sutton’s blog: Work Matters.
Reducing Your Innovation Risk
Nathan Furr
BYU Entrepreneurship Professor Nathan Furr is currently blogging for Forbes.com on topics related to entrepreneurship and innovation. In a recent post, Furr describes the challenges faced in unlocking the secrets to repetitive innovation. When picturing innovators, it’s easy for most people to become enchanted with the romantic notion of one creative individual repeatedly coming up with big successes.
However, Furr believes reality lies in understanding innovation as a process, rather than a series one-off moments of invention. Furr also provides a model for how to lower the risks of innovation, by increasing the speed with which entrepreneurs attempt to validate new ideas in the marketplace.
Perhaps even more interestingly, he goes a step further in suggesting that tech bubbles are not a bad thing for creating long term value and innovation. See Blank’s full closing argument on his blog.
“A bad word whispered will echo a hundred miles.”
Amidst the daily pressures of trying to successfully deliver a product and win over customers, entrepreneurs can forget how their words and actions appear to partners and co-workers. What you might view as your unwavering commitment to success, may appear to colleagues as bullying and grandstanding.
Of course, if your startup is a one-person shop, feel free to blast orders as you’ll be the only one responsible for delivering on them. In fact, some founders prefer to fly solo when it comes to all strategic decisions. But when other employees are involved, savvy entrepreneurs should choose their words wisely.
Richard Scheller, Executive VP of Research and Early Development at Genentech, discovered this lesson when he moved from Stanford University to an expansive management role in the private sector. Here Scheller shares his awkward, amusing, but ultimately illuminating first experience with direct management and the employee/manager review process.
First time managers and entrepreneurs may identify with Scheller’s inaugural experience in building open relationships with employees. The careful selection of one’s words is critical in management, as Scheller says, because employees will try to deliver on what you ask of them. Entrepreneurs benefit from strong leadership in operations, not just when sharing the “big” vision, but also when communicating clear expectations to employees.
Keeping these open lines of communication may require entrepreneurs and employees to face honest and open feedback from one another. While some of this feedback may come as a surprise to each party, a willingness to share constructive insights can encourage greater trust among team members. And beyond carefully choosing your words, as Scheller points out, you need to be a better listener and learn to respect other peoples’ opinions, if you want to make the most of your working relationships.
As the United States trudges its way out of recession and high unemployment rates, Silicon Valley appears to be growing jobs at a faster pace. Even if the job market is picking up, competition for jobs at valley companies will continue to be fierce. And if you’re a startup founder looking to add the next key members to your team, the hiring process can be a fantastic opportunity to seek out great people. Here are a few insights on the recruitment process from some iconic Silicon Valley leaders.
Hire Great People
IDEO Founder David Kelley suggests avoiding conventional approaches to hiring, and in this clip, he offers a few recommendations: 1) Hire non-confomists to stimulate the organization, 2) Hire experts and generalists from different fields, and 3) Form “hot groups” of 8-12 people for maximum impact. Kelley says ideal hires interact well with staff and demonstrate an “attitude of wisdom” that balances the ability to promote ideas and still consider feedback.
Hire the Right People
“The number one thing I look for is raw intelligence,” according to Mark Zuckerberg, the high-profile founder of Facebook. Zuckerberg also believes it’s important to hire individuals who align well with the company’s focus. In this video clip, the founder also reveals the skills and balance of experience he looks for when recruiting college graduates.
Hiring Affects Company Culture
Deciding which candidates to extend offers to is no small responsibility. Emphasizing this point, NVIDIA Founder Jen-Hsun Huang states that hiring decisions are the choice of the company and no one else. With skilled engineers everywhere, hiring decisions often come down to the personalities and motivations of the candidates. Huang believes a candidate’s ability to mesh with the company culture must be a primary consideration in the hiring process.
Building a team for your company can be a daunting task. While you may be focusing on how many employees you need, whom you actually choose to bring in can be a far more important issue. That’s why successful OptiMedica CEO Mark Forchette believes figuring out how to put the right people in the right seats is the single most important thing entrepreneurs can learn.
Building the right company dynamic certainly includes selecting the right board members, investors and fellow employees. Entrepreneurs should always be trying to work with great people. However, putting the right people in the right seats can also extend to personal relationships. Whom do you choose for friends, partners and even a spouse? The entrepreneurial life is hard enough, so make sure to surround yourself with people who support what you are trying to accomplish.
Another reality is that dysfunctional teams probably know they’re dysfunctional. Whether exemplified by poor overall morale or negative communication between internal teams, it’s really easy to tell (at least for employees) when your organization just isn’t working as it should. “Everybody probably knows when they’re not the right person in the right seat,” says Forchette. Entrepreneurs must be brave enough to acknowledge when a relationship just isn’t working out and be ready to make a move.
Comparisons are frequently drawn between CEOs and the head coaches of sports teams. Maybe this explains all the management books written by championship winners. In this comparison, CEOs are leaders who create game plans and find the players they need to win. Jack Dorsey, Twitter co-founder and CEO of mobile payment company Square, sees his job as being much closer to the role of Chief Editorial Officer.
Young companies are constantly flooded with input from customers, engineers, and support teams. However, startups need to choose the one or two ideas that are truly worth focusing on to sustain the product and service for the long-term, says Dorsey. As the Chief Editorial Officer of a startup, he targets three areas in which to apply his editorial guidance.
Editing Team Dynamics
Dorsey believes that if you’re trying to build a group of people to focus on building one great thing, it’s important to aim for the optimal team dynamic. “Edit the best people in, so [you] have a good cast of characters, and edit away any negative elements,” says Dorsey. Moreover, “editing away negative elements” may not mean you have bad employees, but that these employees may just not be the right fit at this time.
Editing Communications
All competent CEOs appreciate the need to communicate vision to internal teams, but what about external audiences? Dorsey believes that a company needs to communicate everything they are through the product or service. Customers and the general public should not be thinking about a person (like a CEO?) when they think about your company. According to Dorsey, the CEO needs to offer editorial guidance to ensure that, “The product is the story we are telling the world.”
Editing the Money in the Bank
For Dorsey, the CEO also fulfills an editorial need when choosing from financing options for a startup. Do you take money from angels or venture capital investors? Or do develop a business model that allows you to build revenue from the start? Dorsey says Square has been fortunate enough to take in revenue since day one, which allows his firm to better balance these issues. However, as every startup is different, a CEO must constantly be editorially selective in choosing the right blend of revenue generation and outside investment to power future growth.
Entrepreneurs spend an immense number of hours dedicated to bringing their ideas and businesses to life, so they should carefully choose the colleagues who will surround them during all that time. Of course, technological or organizational knowledge is a fair prerequisite to have in coworkers, but the human factor can easily be overlooked until a problem arises. Are you surrounding yourself with crew members that not only bring out the best business results, but also the best in their fellow employees?
In this video with Gregory Waldorf, from when he was CEO of eHarmony – now CEO of Invoice2go – he discusses the value of working with great people. According to Waldorf, this can be one of the most memorable and joyful aspects of choosing an entrepreneurial career. In fact, finding a way to work with great people is not only an excellent idea for entrepreneurs, but also for employees working in organizations of all sizes, from small businesses to enterprises.
Don’t lose sight of this aspect of your working life. As you create the next path in your career, be judicious when choosing the crew members you want around for the battles ahead. Success is not easily won, especially for startups, so having the support of quality individuals around you will definitely improve your chances and experience.
