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The Scarcest Resource at Startups is Management Bandwidth

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Re: The Scarcest Resource at Startups is Management Bandwidth

#21

Post by _pius »

ryanmolden wrote: post #19
_pius wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So to be clear, a man writes a book purporting to identify the characteristics and behaviors that make companies great. He calls out some number of such great companies and shows how they all fit into his analysis. Said companies go on to do objectively less than great, and someone calling that out is engaging in FUD? Interesting. Nothing in the article actually shows that the Hedgehog concept is bad or wasn't a fact…

>Nothing in the article actually shows that the Hedgehog concept is bad or wasn't a factor in these companies' success. It's little more than a glib, cocktail-party sized nugget of contrarianism with no real substance. That's why I dismissed it as FUD. And nothing in Jim Collin's book shows it was a factor in their success, he just claims it is because all the companies he analyzed allegedly fit into his rubric. Does…

All he is engaging in is book length common sense "Do what you are good at, don't do what you aren't good at, don't waste money on ill-conceived ideas". Trite sayings that are not really anything anyone would argue against but also don't give a lot of amazing insight.

This is a very common criticism of business books, self-help books, and, hell, advice in general. And yet there are lots of companies and people who neglect to heed these trite sayings and fail because of it. Most people would probably be 10x better at life if they could internalize all of the "obvious" advice they've ever heard.

Maybe I am just too dense to get his brilliance, but I have never seen anything amazing from his writing, which was why I originally responded to someone that appeared to be implying that he was apparently the diviner of the one true path to success.

Fair enough. I viewed the person you responded to as claiming that (1) this bit of Suster's and Collins' advice is useful and (2) this post, like many other startup blog posts, recapitulates concepts covered in traditional business books. The article you linked to does nothing to support or refute either point, which is why I was dismissive of it.

Re: The Scarcest Resource at Startups is Management Bandwidth

#22

Post by [deleted] »

SoftwareMaven wrote: post #17
donw wrote: post #5

Focus is the most important thing you can have as a startup founder. Every failed company that I have founded, worked at, worked with, or heard of, has ultimately failed because they could not focus on a single goal, and instead pursued multiple, divergent plans... all at the same time. Not 'some failed companies', or even 'many failed companies'. Every company that I have seen fail, has failed because they could not…

Yes, but too single-minded of a focus can lead to opportunity blindness. Daily pivots are bad. Never pivoting is bad. Building a successful startup is highly nuanced.

[deleted]

Re: The Scarcest Resource at Startups is Management Bandwidth

#24

Post by robatsu »

The thing that I dislike the most about the technology business is people who want to use developers as crash test dummies for their random ideas and think that "good ideas" are the topmost measure of goodness and once having a good idea, all the rest will naturally unfold.

Pivots are good and oftentimes necessary, but I learned years ago that good ideas are a dime a dozen. The ability of an organization to competently execute on a (seemingly) good idea is the much rarer skill, 1% inspiration/99% perspiration and all that.

The OP seems to think this is something that can be managed. I do believe that, but I'm not sure it is something that can be as easily quantified & then learned as a generic management skill as the OP seems to imply.

Re: The Scarcest Resource at Startups is Management Bandwidth

#25

Post by devenson »

Correlation does not imply causation.

A "startup" is a company in search of a successful business model. Those that fail will leave behind a record of many failed explorations, making it look as thought this was the "cause" of their failure. Perhaps they just failed to find their successful business model. Perhaps it was never there. That said, I do agree with the author. Focus is key.

Re: The Scarcest Resource at Startups is Management Bandwidth

#27

Post by jrkelly »

100% right on focus, but this part is grating:

"But as you know, a few key people in any business have disproportionate impact on the company’s ultimate success. And nobody is more important in this regard than senior management."

You see recommendations for this management style throughout Mark's blog posts. IMO, he is advocating a style that is more centralized than is effective in the uncertain environment of a startup. Strong central control works great when you are executing on a clear business model. Prior to that, you want empowered employees who have a shared view of the current business model hypothesis and are confident enough to question it.

Re: The Scarcest Resource at Startups is Management Bandwidth

#28

Post by wpietri »

donw wrote: post #5

Focus is the most important thing you can have as a startup founder. Every failed company that I have founded, worked at, worked with, or heard of, has ultimately failed because they could not focus on a single goal, and instead pursued multiple, divergent plans... all at the same time. Not 'some failed companies', or even 'many failed companies'. Every company that I have seen fail, has failed because they could not…

For what it's worth, I've seen plenty of failures of other sorts. One of the most common is the "field of dreams" failure mode, where you focus on building your vision, rather than on understanding your customers and building what they actually need in a sustainable fashion.

The canonical example is Webvan: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webvan

They were focused to a fault.

Re: The Scarcest Resource at Startups is Management Bandwidth

#29

Post by wpietri »

devenson wrote: post #25

Correlation does not imply causation. A "startup" is a company in search of a successful business model. Those that fail will leave behind a record of many failed explorations, making it look as thought this was the "cause" of their failure. Perhaps they just failed to find their successful business model. Perhaps it was never there. That said, I do agree with the author. Focus is key.

There's an important difference, though.

At my startup we've tried a lot of things, but we try them serially. We went through a bunch of ideas early on, doing our best to kill the idea in prototype. Here my co-founder talks about how we spent 6 weeks to kill an idea that other people spent 9 months (and millions of dollars) to kill:

http://vimeo.com/24749599

The failure mode that Suster talks about is trying to do all the ideas in parallel. I agree that startups should try a lot of things, but strongly believe they should focus on one at a time.

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