PRINCIPLE 4
Experiment!*
Even though I spend part of my time teaching, I believe most of the nation’s schools have put us at a disadvantage.
The reason is simple. The way we were taught to reason works well if we are facing a predictable future, but not so much in the world as it is now. (No one would say things are getting more predictable.)
The approach we were taught to use to solve problems certainly doesn’t work well if you are trying to create anything new. All you have to do to see that is revisit the steps you were taught in planning your future.
You remember the logic you were instructed to follow:
1. You, your parents, teachers, or bosses forecasted how the future would be.
2. You’d construct a number of plans for achieving that future, picking the optimal one.
3. You’d amass all the necessary resources (education, money, etc.) to achieve your plan.
4. You’d go out and make that plan a reality, taking the most direct route.
As I said, when tomorrow is going to be a lot like today, this approach works just fine. But what is a very smart approach in a knowable or predictable future is not smart at all when things can’t be predicted, like when you are trying to get a new idea off the ground. All that planning goes right out the window when you hit your first unexpected obstacle—and that is likely to occur on Day 1. (See the discussion on why business plans are pretty much a waste of time in Principle 1.)
All this raises an obvious question: When you are in a situation—such as starting a company, or creating anything new, for that matter—where you can’t perfectly plan your way to success, what is the best way to achieve your goals?
Treating an uncertain world as if it were predictable only gets you into trouble.
Fortunately for me, my former boss, Leonard A. Schlesinger, who was president of Babson College, crystallized the best approach to use. It was one that I had been using instinctively, but I didn’t recognize that until I read Len’s books Just Start (Harvard Business Review Press, 2012) and Own Your Future (AMACOM, 2014).
Len starts with the premise that the world is probably going to get more unpredictable rather than less, so the ways of thinking that have gotten us where we are today will be insufficient tomorrow. What follows from that is you need a new way of acting, one that complements—not replaces—the way we were taught to think. (Much will remain predictable, and you don’t want to abandon a set of skills that works well in certain situations.)
Len (along with his coauthors Charles F. Kiefer and Paul B. Brown) reduced his idea for dealing with uncertainty—and again, there is nothing more uncertain than trying to create anything new—to a simple formula. You figure out what you want to do and then you:
1. Act. By taking a small step toward your goal. After you do, you pause to see what you have learned.
2. Learn. You incorporate that learning into how you are thinking about achieving your goal.
3. Build. You build off that learning in preparation for taking your next step. Then you repeat the process, which is the last step.
4. Repeat. You take another small step; pause to see what you learned from step two; building that learning into what you do next; and then take another small step. And so on.
That cycle continues (i.e., repeats) until you succeed, know you are not going to, or decide there is another, more appealing opportunity to pursue.
Take action. Embrace uncertainty. Create the future.
In other words, when facing the unknown, you act your way into the future you desire, you don’t think your way into it. Thinking does not change reality, nor does it necessarily lead to any learning. You can think all day about starting a restaurant, but thinking alone does not get you any closer to having one.
(Here are thirteen reasons why.)
I learned a lot from the former Babson College president Leonard A. Schlesinger’s Act. Learn. Build. Repeat. (ALBR) model.
The key part of the model: taking action.
Why is it so important? In their book, Len, Charlie, and Paul gave thirteen reasons:
1. If you act, you will find out what works . . .
2. . . . and what doesn’t.
3. If you never act, you will never know what is possible and what is not. You may think you know, but you won’t be able to point to anything concrete to prove you are right.
4. If you act, you will find out if you like it . . . with “it” being whatever the new action is.
5. . . . or if you don’t.
6. Acting leads to a market reaction, which could point you in another direction. You thought you were going to open the world’s best Italian restaurant. Taking a small step toward that goal, you began hosting large dinner parties and cooking for the monthly meeting of the Elks Club to try out your recipes and you discover firsthand what cooking and serving food to strangers is like. It turns out people raved about your cooking, but were surprised you didn’t want to talk to them. You, in turn, were left cold by the experience. You hated interacting with people; the idea of doing all the logistics necessary (finding a place, dealing with the constant turnover of servers, etc.) made you break out in a cold sweat, and you really didn’t want to prepare more than three kinds of entrees at a time. You learned you liked the cooking part of running a restaurant but weren’t crazy about all the rest. Your action—the decision to take steps toward starting a restaurant—caused a market reaction—they loved the food but found you to be a cold fish; you loved the cooking but could do without everything else—that persuaded you to go into high-end catering and hire someone to deal with the clients.
7. As you act, you can find people to come along with you. For example, in talking to your suppliers, you ended up meeting the world’s most organized person. She now runs the day-to-day operations of your catering business and is a 10% owner.
8. As you act, you can find ways to do things faster, cheaper, better. You discover, after making your world-famous Chicken Parmigiana fifty times, that you can prepare the dish in eight steps instead of eleven.
9. If you act, you won’t spend the rest of your life going “I wonder what would have happened if . . .”
10. If all you do is think, you may end up being less interesting as a person. Who would you rather sit next to on a plane: someone who started a successful rock-climbing store (or even an unsuccessful one), or someone who only thought about it?
11. If all you ever do is think about stuff, you can gain tons of theoretical knowledge, but none from the real world. You become like that woman in the fable who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing. In other words, if all you ever do is think . . . all you do is think.
12. Action always leads to evidence. You act, therefore something changes, and in observing that reaction, you gain knowledge. (Hmm, if I drop an egg from waist height, will it shatter?) Thinking doesn’t lead to proof—or messy floors. As Scott Cook, the founder of Intuit, says: “Evidence is better than anyone’s intuition.”
13. If you act, you know what is real. You always want to know what’s real.
You will remember when I started talking about ALBR; I said it all begins with what you really want to do. That’s the “passion” part we talked about in Principle 3. Without passion, implementing the model effectively will be substantially harder, and starting anything new is difficult enough without you handicapping yourself.
If you have that passion, then Step 1 is to Act. YOU HAVE TO START! This is what separates entrepreneurs from everyone else—that is, all those people who talk about creating something new but never do.
Starting is scary. Starting means you put yourself—and your money—out there and at risk. Starting means you are facing, head-on, the possibility that you may fail and fail in front of family and friends who may have provided funding. Instead of doing any of those frightening things it is easier, and feels safer, to keep thinking about your new idea.
If that is the course you take, you will never start anything.
So, while I understand why you think you have to do a lot of research before you begin, it really isn’t necessary—or helpful. Instead, create a prototype or verbally sketch out your idea and ask people on the spot to write you a check for the product or service you plan to provide. If they do, you are on to something.
If they don’t, really listen to what they have to say. What is it that they don’t like? What would it take to get them to buy? Blue Buffalo started in 2005 with approximately ten products and no test market or focus groups. It got on the shelves and the marketplace decided if it was a good product. (By 2014, there were more than five hundred products and still growing.) This is no small point. You may think you have the greatest idea in the world, but it is only the market that will tell you if you are right. If it tells you that you need to change your product, then you need to change your product.
FOUR TAKEAWAYS FROM THIS CHAPTER
1. Act. Nothing happens unless you do.
2. Learn. Newton got it right. Every action causes a reaction. Learn from it.
3. Build. Build that learning into your plan for achieving your goals.
4. Repeat. Keep reinventing yourself. It’s very hard for your competition to hit a moving target.
*I am indebted to my former boss, Leonard A. Schlesinger, now the Baker Foundation Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School, for helping to create the foundation for this chapter. When Dr. Schlesinger was president of Babson, he (along with Charles F. Kiefer and Paul B. Brown) wrote a book called Just Start that helped me crystallize my thinking when it came to experimentation.
Len, Charlie, and Paul followed that book up with Own Your Future: How to Think Like an Entrepreneur and Thrive in an Unpredictable Economy, which they wrote for AMACOM.
The authors were kind enough to give me permission to build on their ideas. In exchange, not only do I want to thank them, but I suggest you look at both books because they are very good.