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Ma3: It's Not About Love

On want, need, Fridays and competition.

Air date: Wednesday, 21st Oct. 2020, 08 : 35 AM Pacific/US.

TOPIC: You don't have to love it

If love is a prerequisite of starting a business, most of the work we're willing to pay for wouldn't get done.

Double coincidence of wants

It's convenient if you love to do work that I want done (and can pay for), and vise-versa. But putting that constraint on all work is ludicrous. Perhaps such a world is imaginable, but the experiment is hard to run.

Fridays and rough spots

Mondays can be very bad, whether or not you love what you do.

'Independence', capital and overhead

There's no truly independent business. Capital is a major factor. Capital needs are relative. And chasing capital means not rethinking costs (another trade-off).

Doing things you want to do more

People arrive at entrepreneurship from different backgrounds, but they share the sense that it's an improvement over the alternatives.

Flat lines and exponential curves

It's bad news when you discover how disappointing your first offerings are. (And many business people accept producing crap.)

It doesn't feel good to not know whether you're in the long slow stage of being successful, or dead in the water.

More entrepreneurs, more competition

It seems like more entrepreneurs would be good, but that's not obviously true for an entrepreneur.

It's not clear what to think about competitive buyouts. Consider Instagram and WhatsApp (now owned by Facebook), and Youtube (now owned by Google).

Blue ocean, red ocean

Perhaps you want to compete on price, or on quality. If you don't want to compete at all, you want blue ocean.1 In typical business pep-speak:

"The best way to drive profitable growth? Stop competing in overcrowded industries. In those red oceans, companies try to outperform rivals to grab bigger slices of existing demand. As the space gets increasingly crowded, profit and growth prospects shrink. Products become commoditized. Ever-more-intense competition turns the water bloody. How to avoid the fray? Kim and Mauborgne recommend creating blue oceans—uncontested market spaces where the competition is irrelevant. In blue oceans, you invent and capture new demand, and you offer customers a leap in value while also streamlining your costs. Results? Handsome profits, speedy growth—and brand equity that lasts for decades while rivals scramble to catch up."2

The FT graphic that says it all: bigger and bigger sharks.3 Want and need, life and death

You have to want something, or need something. Maybe you want out of a job, or to avoid the job hunt. Maybe you look at your future and don't see anything good.

Andy grove talked about 'strategic inflection points', forks in the road that lead to life or death.4 And before that, he painted another clear picture:

"Now, you may be tempted to look around your workplace and point to your fellow workers as rivals, but they are not. They are outnumbered—a thousand to one, one hundred thousand to one, a million to one—by people who work for organizations that compete with your firm. So if you want to work and continue to work, you must continually dedicate yourself to retaining your individualcompetitive advantage."5

Business and marriage

Like marriage, business can be about love, but isn't necessarily. And even if it is about love, dumb expectations lead to bad results.

Pushing a car

Yes, manage your energy, not your time.6 And get and keep momentum whenever you can.7

But work is not so much about an ethic, but a skill set. One has to learn how to push a car when there's no gas in the tank.

References

Grove, A. S. (1995). High Output Management. Vintage / Random House. ISBN: 978-0679762881. Searches: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=978-0679762881 https://www.google.com/search?q=isbn+978-0679762881 https://lccn.loc.gov/96110812

Grove, A. S. (1996). Only the Paranoid Survive: How to Exploit the Crisis Points That Challenge Every Company. Currency / Doubleday. ISBN: 0385483821. Searches: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=0385483821 https://www.google.com/search?q=isbn+0385483821 https://lccn.loc.gov/96013509

HBR (2011). HBR's 10 Must Reads Boxed Set: The Essentials. Harvard Business Review Press, Kindle ed. ISBN: 978-1422172018. Searches: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=978-1422172018 https://www.google.com/search?q=isbn+978-1422172018

Kim, W. C., & Mauborgne, R. (2004). Blue Ocean Strategy. At 75%, location 19,695 (no pagination) in HBR (2011). Originally published in October 2004.

Norris, D. (2014). The 7 Day Startup: You Don't Learn Until You Launch. Dan Norris. ISBN: 978-1502472397. Searches: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=978-1502472397 https://www.google.com/search?q=isbn+978-1502472397

Schwartz, T., & McCarthy, C. (2007). Manage Your Energy, Not Your Time. At 25%, location 6,413 (no pagination) in HBR (2011). Originally published in October 2007.

Index Facebook, 1 FT (Financial Times), 1

Google, 1

Instagram, 1

WhatsApp, 1

Youtube, 1

1For a brief write-up of the idea, see Kim & Mauborgne (2004)

2From an unattributed summary in Kim & Mauborgne (2004)

3https://images.app.goo.gl/d6CurWTKSKKc5pWr6

4Grove (1996) p. 32.

5Grove (1995) p. xix.

6Schwartz & McCarthy (2007)

7Norris (2014) p. 186.