Chapter 12. Entrepreneurial Execution
“The five essential entrepreneurial skills for success are concentration, discrimination, organization, innovation and communication.”
Michael Faraday
“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma—which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”
Steve Jobs
“It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.”
Warren Buffett
“Choose a job you love and you will never have to work a day in your life.”
Confucius
“Vision without execution is hallucination.”
Thomas A. Edison
Have you ever noticed that the most challenging problems require you to step back, throw away your assumptions, and look at the problem carefully from a different perspective? This process requires you to dive deeper into the problem and contemplate whether your approach is right, if your models hold up correctly, if there are similar solutions to the problem, how solving this problem really helps the customer, and whether there are other ways to solve the problem. You talk to others and slowly the solution begins to reveal itself as you immerse yourself in the details.
Entrepreneurial execution is about finding new and innovative ways to solve problems and, as Richard Branson suggests, to “make other people’s lives better.” It is this quest that makes the life of an architect an exciting journey.
This chapter unveils one of the essential skills needed by a software architect: the ability to apply entrepreneurial execution to software architecture.
Entrepreneurial Execution Defined
“Entrepreneurship is the pursuit of opportunity without regard to resources currently controlled.”
Howard Stevenson
“Entrepreneurship is at the intersection of an idea that solves a problem and the actions taken to implement the idea.”
Randy Blass
Entrepreneurial execution is the vitality that breathes life into architecture. It is the spirit of adventure and of solving epic problems that inspires you day by day. It is knowing that what you do will make a difference in the world and will enable others to do great things.
The elements of entrepreneurial execution include vision, innovation, solving problems, throwing out the past, persistence (relentless drive), identifying the small change that changes the world, recognizing patterns from other domains that apply to yours, perceiving a problem that others don’t yet see, recognizing a solved problem, taking calculated risks, and delivering results.
Entrepreneurial execution is where an idea meets action (see Figure 12.1).
Figure 12.1. Entrepreneurial execution
It is the spirit of exploration—the “Go west, young man” of Horace Greeley—that drives entrepreneurial execution.
Elements of Entrepreneurial Execution
Entrepreneurial execution is about bringing an entrepreneurial spirit to the work that you do, taking calculated risks, and delivering results (see Figure 12.2).
Figure 12.2. Elements of entrepreneurial execution
Entrepreneurial execution, sometimes known as intrapreneurship within a corporation, can help you deliver results that bring innovation and add significant value to the company.
Entrepreneurial Spirit
Businesses need to grow and deliver an increasing amount of value to their customers. This need drives businesses to seek teams that embody an entrepreneurial spirit to help maximize that value. The essence of an entrepreneurial spirit is
• Innovation. This is the ability to discover new and creative ways to deliver value to customers. It requires a natural level of curiosity and constant observation of the things that surround you. (See Chapter 10, “Technology Innovation.”)
• Passion. This is the enthusiasm that you radiate when you love what you do. Passion can supply the fuel necessary to keep you motivated and continuing to drive toward a solution.
• Thriving in adversity. As the old saying goes, “Necessity is the mother of invention.” Adversity can help drive you to new solutions by enabling you to better deliver value to your customers through refining and adapting the solutions you are trying to create.
• Optimism. This is the almost unstoppable belief that you can get where you want to go regardless of the storms that are swirling around you.
• Depth of knowledge. When you immerse yourself in a problem space for long periods of time, look at it from nearly every possible vantage point, and research solutions to issues in this problem space extensively, you naturally begin to develop a level of expertise that few others possess. This depth of knowledge enables you to quickly navigate around questions and conversations that are centered in this area and to demonstrate your expertise. You know what is easy and known in this area and what the hard problems and unknowns are. This depth of knowledge will become part of your brand.
• Focus. This is the ability to block out the noise and concentrate on the top two or three items that need to be accomplished and delivered. This directly ties into the notion of an MVP (what is essential to deliver) and product/market fit (a product that can satisfy the needs of the market).
• Trusting your gut feeling. This is about learning to listen to your gut feeling and having the confidence to follow it. It will help guide your decisions when all the facts are not readily available.
• Credibility. This is about establishing trust with those who will invest financial capital or allocate resources to your ideas. You need to be authentic and have integrity in what you say and do to gain credibility. You need to deliver on what you commit to.
Calculated Risk Taking
There are always risks to projects. The challenge is to minimize the impact of the risks in a manner that allows you to change, grow, and improve while not putting your core assets at risk.
There are a variety of ways to accomplish this:
• Learn from others. Take the time to gather the experiences of others who have traveled or tried to travel down this path. Experience is a great teacher, and learning from others’ experience can shorten your path to success.
• Utilize POCs (proofs of concept). POCs are great tools to help determine the viability of solutions or to help navigate the decision-making process about which path to follow. Using them allows you to fail, learn, and adjust your direction early and quietly without a major impact to the project. The key is to do them quickly and minimize the effort required.
• Enable and use A/B testing. In areas where you are trying to measure customer interest, A/B testing can help you compare two or more variances of a solution and determine which ones attract the most interest. The key is to make sure you vary only one element of the solution at a time. Gathering and comparing the results of the users’ behavior can give you great insights into which approach or approaches work best.
• Minimize the required investment. If you can minimize the required investment to the point where a loss is affordable (see the section on principles that follows), you can take the risk and not endanger your ability to survive to another day. This is one of the key ideas behind an MVP. The challenge is to ensure that there is still enough value to engage your customers with the solution.
You may notice a pattern here. The key is to do, measure, learn, and repeat. You always need to keep your end goal in mind to ensure that you are heading in the right direction. Otherwise, a series of small decisions can leave you pointing in the wrong direction.
From an architecture perspective, the key is to enable the ability to measure key performance indicators and enable low-cost system changes without impacting the overall design or quality of the system. You want to be data driven.
Delivering Results
One of the most import things a business needs from an architect is the ability to deliver results. Working closely with the business to navigate the creation of a product or platform and making the pragmatic daily decisions necessary to deliver customer value through techniques such as MVP are essential to delivering results consistently.
Entrepreneurial Execution Principles
The goal of architecture is to enable the business to achieve its goals. One of the chief goals of most businesses is to grow. The following principles embody the spirit of entrepreneurship and can help align architectural decisions to lean toward successfully growing the business.
Affordable Loss Principle
The Affordable Loss Principle is looking at what the potential loss would be if this decision is made or not made and making a determination of whether or not you can afford that loss, whether it be financial, reputation, time to market, scalability, or some other type of loss. From an architecture perspective, this is what drives many of the nonfunctional requirement decisions such as disaster recovery, security, and identity management. It is important to note that what is determined to be an affordable loss may change over time as the business or product grows.
Lemonade Principle
The Lemonade Principle means taking a different perspective on the problems at hand. Maybe instead of being problems, they are really opportunities that are waiting to be recognized (making lemonade out of lemons), for instance, when you are trying to build a roadmap and you reach a point where there appears to be no known solution for how to get from point A to point B. This may be a problem that many different organizations and companies are encountering, and solving it may be the real product or solution that you should research and build. It may be an opportunity to pivot. It is important to note that the business is about delivering results, not necessarily the results that were originally intended.
Patchwork Quilt Principle
The Patchwork Quilt Principle means solving the problems of your current set of investors (those who are footing the bills). The advantage of taking this type of approach is that you have one of the critical issues solved—having someone who cares enough about what you are doing to give you money. They are already committed, and the advice they give you may be self-serving, but it will be real, and not just opinions. Generally speaking, if you can make at least one person truly happy with your solution, you are off to the races.
During platform development, your current investors are often those who are willing to fund new features in the platform. They aren’t just making suggestions (“It would be really nice if . . .”); they are making a real commitment to spend limited investment dollars and use your platform. Let these committed partners guide and help craft your vision.
Bird-in-the-Hand Principle
The Bird-in-the-Hand Principle means using the things you have to drive and create solutions. There is always that great new shiny object that if you only had it (better known as “shiny object syndrome”), you would be able to easily produce the system that is being sought. From an architecture perspective, can you use an existing technology (sometimes the new technologies don’t operationalize very well), or can the current development staff learn the needed skills (sometimes existing domain knowledge is critical to solving the new problems)? The key is to leverage what you have to the greatest extent possible; it usually has more value than you think.
Pilot-in-the-Plane Principle
The Pilot-in-the-Plane Principle means that the future is not the outcome of some inevitable trend, but rather is the outcome of human choices and actions. It is the pilot in the plane who will have the most direct effect on the success of the flight based on the pilot’s actions or inactions. The great news is that you have the ability to determine your future. As an architect, your actions or inactions will directly impact the success or failure of a project; you get the opportunity to help craft that future.
Seize the Moment
For entrepreneurs, there is no time like the present. In reality, this is the only time you are guaranteed to have. Action is something that can help you engage in innovating and developing new solutions for customers.
There is often a tendency to want to wait for just a few more details to arrive and then start, but in reality you need to start doing, and that can enable the learning process to begin. It will also give you time to fail and restart a few times.
For architects, beginning to explore an area by beginning to model problems, “playing” with technology, visually beginning to represent knowledge that is acquired, and getting feedback on the thoughts surrounding a particular solution can enable the moment to be seized and a jump on the competition to be afoot.
Follow Your Passion
Following your passion (the areas that fundamentally interest you) is your internal compass. It is naturally focused on areas that can maintain your interest for the long haul. It will make the journey you are on seem like an adventure with some days being very exciting, some days being a bit scary, but overall the path presents the opportunity to fulfill your destiny.
If you are not sure what your passions are, consider:
• What areas do you naturally like to talk about?
• In what areas do you lose track of time when you are engaged with them?
• To what areas does your mind naturally drift off when you are daydreaming?
• What areas give you a sense of fulfillment when you are pursuing them?
These are your areas of passion. Think about what you need to do to find ways to pursue these areas. Your daily grind will become a much more enjoyable experience when you pursue the areas you are passionate about.
Most people who interact with you can probably easily tell you what you are passionate about. You are likely overflowing with information about that area. You know the pros. You know the cons. You know what works and what doesn’t work. You truly have a wealth of information.
People can tell your passion without you having to state it because it’s who you are.
Learn to Pivot
Pivoting is the ability to recognize that the current path is not working and change is required. Having the confidence and ability to make course corrections is an essential element of entrepreneurship. It is unlikely that the exact course you have planned for going from point A to point B will work. Learning to pivot when roadblocks are encountered is a necessity (see Figure 12.3).
Figure 12.3. Roadblocks are simply pivot opportunities.
When you need to pivot, take the time to see where the big opportunity lies (your end state, your vision), adjust your course based on all of the information you have, and understand where the overall industry is heading; doing so can keep you moving forward.
The challenge is being willing to change and to leave behind what you potentially have made a large investment in. Here are a few key considerations when you need to explore pivoting:
• Why is the current approach not working?
• What assumptions are not valid?
• Has anything fundamentally changed in the industry?
• Are other people having similar problems with this architectural approach?
• Does your vision need to change based on the realities that have been learned?
• What is different about the new approach that will enable success?
• How will the pivot affect your customers?
Once you are comfortable with making course adjustments and successfully navigating the detours and challenges you face, your overall confidence to jump in and take on whatever is thrown your way goes up dramatically. You realize it is okay for things to go wrong and just deal with it.
Learn by Doing (Making Mistakes), but Do It Cost-Effectively
In the world of software, there really is no better way to learn than to actually do what you desire to get done. You don’t necessarily need to do everything, but you do need to play around with the software enough that you have a sense of
• What its capabilities are
• Where it is effective
• Where it doesn’t work well
• What assumptions you have that don’t hold up
• What new risks exist that you were previously unaware of
• What new dependencies exist that you were previously unaware of
• Where the software needs to be improved
• Whether what you hope to do is even possible
The first challenge of experiencing learning is to establish clear goals about what you are seeking to learn and determine how much time you are willing to invest. By time-boxing and financially boxing in a proof of concept or spike, you will be able to gain the key learnings that are needed with limited investment.
The second challenge is to secure the funding necessary to learn what you are seeking. This work may not be capitalizable due to its lack of size, and the business may not have planned on this effort as part of its capital planning. With clear objectives about risk to delivery and a little persistence, you can secure some portion of the budget to allow for these kinds of activities.
By taking the time to make mistakes, to learn, and to try again, you can mitigate the risks associated with a particular direction and help gain the business’s confidence that this new way of approaching a problem is viable. This low-cost approach to eliminating risk and increasing the likelihood of delivery will help you have the staying power you need to inject innovation and entrepreneurship into your business.
Seek Feedback
One of the best ways to establish a route to your vision is to create a feedback loop (see Figure 12.4). You regularly need to get feedback about
Figure 12.4. Feedback loops will keep you aligned with your goals even when they change.
• Where you are
• What has been completed
• Where you are going
• What is not working
• What is working
• How things could be improved
This feedback can come from customers, vendors, and employees. Getting feedback from different perspectives can help ground your decision making. Make sure you electronically capture all of the feedback you receive so that it will be much easier to find in the future.
You want to listen closely to what is being said, both positive and negative. By listening closely to feedback, you have the opportunity to use feedback like a GPS system and let it help guide you to your destination.
The challenge with a waterfall approach to development is that there really is no opportunity for feedback to occur and for incremental improvements to be a source of constant refinement and perfection of the solution.
As you use feedback loops to help with course corrections, keep your end state in mind to help avoid optimizations that don’t move you toward your larger goals.
Seek Leverage
It is rare that any solution is completely new and that every component of the solution is a first-time build. The uniqueness and innovation come from the unique combination of the components of the solution (most of which previously existed) and adding only those things for which a solution did not previously exist. Leveraging gives you the opportunity to meet your business needs in a cost- and time-effective manner (see Figure 12.5).
Leveraging existing components, especially open-source and other commodities, can
• Significantly reduce your overall cost of ownership.
• Allow you to get to a working solution more quickly.
• Allow you to focus on the areas where you provide unique value.
• Leverage the work and experience of others. You can stand on their shoulders.
• Limit your potential set of solutions. You need to think about what you are giving up, what new risks you are introducing, and what new dependencies you are adding.
Leverage can be both good and bad (generally more on the good side). As with all decisions, you need to spend some time thinking through what you are gaining and losing in making this choice. Most decisions can be reversed later. However, if it is a core foundational piece of the architecture, swapping it out later may be a costly endeavor.
Sometimes you can isolate these types of components within the system so that changing them later does not negatively affect everything. Using these forms of indirection can be very powerful in an architecture. However, having too many levels of indirection can cause confusion and a general lack of understanding. Use indirection with caution.
Architecting with Entrepreneurial Execution
“I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.”
Bill Cosby
Architecting with entrepreneurial execution is fun and exciting. It does bring out naysayers as well. You need to pick the path that is right for your customers and for the business. The entrepreneurial principles can be a measuring stick for the decisions that need to be made and allow you to move forward in bringing new things into the architectural stack in a way that aligns well with the business and creates new capabilities to give you a competitive advantage in the marketplace.
Summary
The road to entrepreneurial execution begins with
• Understanding the elements of entrepreneurial execution
• Entrepreneurial spirit
• Calculated risk taking
• Delivering results
• Using entrepreneurial execution principles as guidance
• Affordable Loss Principle
• Lemonade Principle
• Patchwork Quilt Principle
• Bird-in-the-Hand Principle
• Pilot-in-the-Plane Principle
• Seize the moment
• Follow your passion
• Learn to pivot
• Learn by doing and making mistakes
• Seek feedback
• Seek leverage
• Architecting with entrepreneurial execution
For me, working with new product development, innovating on new and improved products, and developing business-relevant architectures are challenging and exciting. Operating with an entrepreneurial spirit keeps the technology stack current and allows for areas of greenfield development that provide significant value to the business.
References
Bank, Steve. 2012. The Startup Owner’s Manual: The Step-by-Step Guide for Building a Great Company. K&S Ranch.
———. 2013. The Four Steps to the Epiphany, Second Edition. K&S Ranch.
Blekman, Thomas. 2011. Corporate Effectuation: What Managers Should Learn from Entrepreneurs. K&S Ranch.
Croll, Alistair, and Benjamin Yoskovitz. 2013. Lean Analytics: Use Data to Build a Better Startup Faster. O’Reilly Media.
Harvard Business Review. 2011. Harvard Business Review on Succeeding as an Entrepreneur. Harvard Business Review Press.
Holiday, Ryan. 2013. Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising. Portfolio.
Johnson, Kevin D. 2013. The Entrepreneur Mind: 100 Essential Beliefs, Characteristics, and Habits of Elite Entrepreneurs. Johnson Media Inc.
Kuratko, Donald F. 2008. Entrepreneurship: Theory, Process, and Practice. Cengage Learning.
Ries, Eric. 2011. The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses. Crown Business.
Sarasvathy, Saras D. 2009. Effectuation: Elements of Entrepreneurial Expertise. Edward Elgar Publishing.
Siroker, Dan, and Pete Koomen. 2013. A/B Testing: The Most Powerful Way to Turn Clicks into Customers. Wiley.