Quotes for entrepreneurs curated in September 2024 on a theme of coordination, collaboration, and teamwork.
Quotes For Entrepreneurs Curated in September 2024
My theme for this month’s “Quotes for Entrepreneurs” is coordination, collaboration, and teamwork.
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“You can create value with breakthrough innovation, incremental refinement, or complex coordination. Great companies often do two of these. The very best companies do all three.”
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Industrial production, the flow of resources in the economy, the exertion of military effort in a war theater-all are complexes of numerous interrelated activities. Differences may exist in the goals to be achieved, the particular processes involved, and the magnitude of effort. Nevertheless, it is possible to abstract the underlying essential similarities in the management of these seemingly disparate systems.
George Dantzig in “Linear Programming and extensions“
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“Great teams consist of individuals who have learned to trust each other. Over time, they have discovered each other’s strengths and weaknesses, enabling them to play as a coordinated whole.”
Quoted in “Team of Teams” by Stanley McChrystal
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Three fundamental problems facing Intel:
- It doesn’t have the best manufacturing.
- It doesn’t design the best chips.
- It is out of the game in AI.
Ben Thompson (@BenThompson) in Intel Honesty
Thompson documents the compounding interactions of several key mistakes: impact has been slowly with current business model now unsustainable. A sea change in semiconductors. A cost-cutting layoff 15,000 may ultimately grow to 50-80,000.
“Intel ended last year with 124,800 people; to put that in context, TSMC had 76,478 employees and AMD 26,000, which is to say that the two companies combined had fewer employees than Intel while making better x86 chips, an actually competitive GPU, and oh yeah, making chips for everyone else on earth, including Apple and Nvidia. A 15,000 employee cut is both too small and too late.”
Ben Thompson (@BenThompson) in Intel Honesty
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“Indiana Jones and the Quest for the Single Source of Truth Dashboard”
Vicki Boykis (@VBoykis) Sep-3-2024 tweet
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“Radical technologies require conservative engineering.”
Hyman Rickover
Quoted in “Who Can Hold the Sea: The U.S. Navy in the Cold War, 1945-1960” by James D. Hornfischer. Too many “breakthrough projects” load design risk and implementation risk on top of technology risk. Rickover’s push to pioneer nuclear submarines recognized the need for high margins of safety, resulting in a 4x speedup (5 knots vs. 20) and an underwater range increase of roughly 48X (20 knots x 96 hours -> 1920nm vs. 5 knots x 8 hours -> 40nm).
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“The temptation to lead as a chess master, controlling each move of the organization, must give way to an approach as a gardener, enabling rather than directing. A gardening approach to leadership is anything but passive. The leader acts as an “Eyes-On, Hands-Off” enabler who creates and maintains an ecosystem in which the organization operates.”
Stanley McChrystal in “Team of Teams“
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“Your customers are partners in your mission.”
Shep Hyken
In the long run, it leads to better results if you view customers as partners in a collaborative effort to prosper jointly than in a zero-sum negotiation where one wins and the other loses. Some customers don’t see it that way, but you don’t have to do business with them.
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“They call it ‘crowd control’ for a reason. If you’re in a crowd, it’s quite likely someone is trying to control you.
If you’re posting on social media or any platform with an algorithm, the real question is: do you work for the algorithm or are you committed to working for the people who want to go where you hope to take them?”
Seth Godin in “Feeding the Algorithm“
Ezlet Blaauw and I discussed the frequently negative impact of algorithmic moderation / curation on conversations in a community in “Human vs. Algorithmic Moderation.” I suggested:
“The challenge is that the algorithm may ignore or penalize things people value. Worse, people are often put off by what you say or write when trying to please the algorithm. You fall into Uncanny Valley, and they perceive you as acting strangely, inauthentically, or robotically.
I think you have to delight your audience and satisfy the algorithm.”
Sean Murphy in “Human vs. Algorithmic Moderation.”
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“A good rule of thumb for a product manager: user stories that call for “reporting” should include a concrete example of a user consuming the report and making a valuable decision based on it.”
Roger L. Cauvin (@rcauvin)
I like Anthony Tjan’s “Three Minute Rule”
- What happens 3 minutes before they run the report?
- What do they do 3 minutes after reading–and understanding–the report?
Use this to learn the customer’s context–the larger workflow they are likely operating within–identify adjacent opportunities, and understand how the customer may value them.
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“It’s easy to mistake polish for conceptual quality. One of the most significant choices any designer can make is the level of polish/detail of any artifact. Shiny artifacts with a lot of detail imply “done,” impede collaboration, and often focus attention on the wrong things. Rough, loose diagrams invite participation and most importantly criticism. You need to catch bad concepts at the conceptual level.”
Erika Hall
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“Organizational design is a decision process that brings coherence between the goals or purposes for which the organization exists, the patterns of division of labor, inter-unit coordination, and the people who will do the work.”
Jay R. Galbraith in Organization Design (1977)
Galbraith’s Star Model outlines five key factors in organizational design:
- Strategy: company’s formula for winning.
- Structure: placement of power and authority in the organization. Structure policies fall into four areas:
- Specialization: the type and numbers of job specialties used in performing the work.
- Shape: headcount in departments at each level of the structure. Large numbers of people in each department create flat organization structures with few levels.
- Distribution of power: includes classic issues of centralization or decentralization and empowerment of departments dealing directly with the issues critical to its mission.
- Departmentalization: is the basis for forming departments at each level of the structure.
- Processes: information and decision processes cut across the organization’s structure; if structure is thought of as the anatomy of the organization, processes are its physiology or functioning.
- Rewards: align the goals of the employee with the goals of the organization, providing motivation and incentive for the completion of the strategic direction.
- People: the human resource policies of recruiting, selection, rotation, training, and development.
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“You not only have to be several different people to successfully live one life, but they all have to be pretty good at passing a baton.”
Robert Brault (@RobertBrault18)
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“Organizations are systems of coordinated action among individuals and groups whose preferences, information, interests, or knowledge differ. Organization theories describe the delicate conversion of conflict into cooperation, the mobilization of resources, and the coordination of effort that facilitate the joint survival of an organization and its members.”
Herbert A. Simon
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“When a very conspicuous building in our city, which we expect to outlive us, is destroyed by enemy action, then it’s not only the lives of the people who are lost in it, but the lives of all of us, and the hope of future life which is cut away. And they know it. They know what they are doing.”
Vincent Scully in closing remarks for a Sep-15-2001 symposium on architecture at Yale ‘White, Gray, and Blue.“
h/t Jonathan Rosen “What September 11 Revealed” I found this very moving, noting in “Reclaiming Nine-Eleven” that, “In the end the hijackers did not cut away our hopes for the future, we have persevered. We remember but move forward.”
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“Systems engineering is most effectively conceived of as a process that starts with the detection of a problem and continues through problem definition, planning and designing of a system, manufacturing or other implementing section, its use, and finally on to its obsolescence. Further, Systems engineering is not a matter of tools alone; It is a careful coordination of process, tools and people.”
Arthur .D. Hall in “Systems Engineering from an Engineering Viewpoint” In: Systems Science and Cybernetics. Vol.1 Issue.1 (Nov-1965).
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Three attributes of successful early stage startup culture:
- The whole team is involved in the details. Anyone can argue about the product because everyone works to be a product expert.
- Everyone does the work. The stratification of responsibility is a red flag not just in rapidly growing team, but any company. Everyone files bugs because everyone uses the product. Yes, there is job specialization, but there is also a belief that we are equally accountable for the product.
- An organization chart doesn’t tell you who can speak with whom; it tells you who is accountable for what. It’s a map. Not a power structure.
Michael Lopp in “Words on Founder Mode“
The entire essay is worth reading, it’s Lopp’s response to Paul Graham’s Sep-2024 “Founder Mode” essay.
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“A society that relies on generalized reciprocity is more efficient than a distrustful society, for the same reason that money is more efficient than barter. Trust lubricates social life. Networks of civic engagement also facilitate coordination and communication and amplify information about the trustworthiness of other individuals.”
Robert D. Putnam in “Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community”
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“Those who know me don’t bet against me,
and those who bet against me don’t know me.”
Dr. Jeremy Goldberg in “It’ll Be OK, and You will Be Too“
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“In this life the individual shrinks to nothing, he has not the right to an opinion, only the regiment matters.”
Lord Moran in “The Anatomy of Courage“
Moran wrote about psychological impact of war on soldiers in Word War 1.
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“In place of maps, whiteboards began to appear in our headquarters. Soon they were everywhere. Standing around them, markers in hand, we thought out loud, diagramming what we knew, what we suspected, and what we did not know. We covered the bright white surfaces with multicolored words and drawings, erased, and then covered again. We did not draw static geographic features; we drew mutable relationships–the connections between things rather than the things themselves.”
General S McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World
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“My fantasy: A business where everyone blogs. Everyone thinks about what they are doing and writes about what they are doing. From the top to the bottom, the edges to the middle. Everyone awake and bouncing off each other intellectually as they get more and more effective at whatever they do.”
Euan Semple in “My Fantasy” (2011)
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“I have observed, throughout life, that a man may do an immense deal of good, if he does not care who gets the credit for it. ”
Father Strickland in a diary entry dated September 21, 1863 written by Sir Mountstuart E. Grant Duff
reminds of another quote:
“The mature man lives quietly, does good privately, takes responsibility for his actions, treats others with friendliness and courtesy, finds mischief boring and avoids it. Without this hidden conspiracy of goodwill, society would not endure an hour.”
Kenneth Rexroth in his 1961 Introduction to Leo Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God Is Within You“
I really like this quote and have used it in “Success For a Bootstrapper,” “No Man Is a Failure Who Has Friends,” “Dark Watchman vs. The Architect of Fear,“and my December 2015 Quotes roundup.
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“What is not good for the swarm, cannot be good for the bee.”
Marcus Aurelius in Meditations, Book 6 [MIT, Long Translation]
Civil society requires ongoing collaboration, Rexroth’s “a hidden conspiracy of goodwill,” a critical set of interdependencies that we must recognize and act on. We cannot live in a vacuum.
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“It is evident that many great and useful objects can be attained in this world only by cooperation. It is equally evident that there cannot be efficient cooperation if men proceed on the principle that they must not cooperate for one object unless they agree about other objects. Nothing seems to us more beautiful or admirable in our social system than the facility with which thousands of people, who perhaps agree only on a single point, can combine their energies for the purpose of carrying that single point. We see daily instances of this. Two men, one of them obstinately prejudiced against missions, the other president of a missionary society, sit together at the board of a hospital, and heartily concur in measures for the health and comfort of the patients. Two men, one of whom is a zealous supporter and the other a zealous opponent of the system pursued in Lancaster’s schools, meet at the Mendicity Society, and act together with the utmost cordiality. The general rule we take to be undoubtedly this, that it is lawful and expedient for men to unite in an association for the promotion of a good object, though they may differ with respect to other objects of still higher importance.”
Thomas Babington Macaulay in “Gladstone on Church and State” (1839)
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“Struggles that we and our students hope to undertake ought to be measured by their value, on the one hand, and real chances for completion on the other: Battles large enough to matter, small enough to win.”
I used this in “Small Wins Enable Larger Wins.” Kozol’s quote is often rendered as “Pick battles big enough to matter, small enough to win.”
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O would some Power give us the gift to see ourselves as others see us! It would free us from many a blunder and foolish notion.
Robert Burns
This is my free text translation of his poem “To a Louse.” This is another benefit from cooperation, your team mates can point out our blind spots and mistakes. Here is the original that Burns wrote in Scottish Dialect.
O wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!
It wad frae monie a blunder free us,
An’ foolish notionRobert Burns in “To a Louse“
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