METHOD AND SYSTEM TO BOND, OR INTEGRATE TIGHTLY, SOFTWARE TO HARDWARE, SOFTWARE TO OTHER SOFTWARE, HARDWARE TO OTHER HARDWARE, AND THE RESULT OF ANY BONDED COMBINATIONS TO ADDITIONAL SOFTWARE OR ADDITIONAL HARDWARE.

A must watch for any entrepreneur, entrepreneur-in-the-making, student in any school, marketers . . . . anyone in business. Most valuable if you are NOT an architect, this movie is less about architecture (the WHAT), and more about digging down inside the self (the WHY) in order to “open the floodgates“, and unleash what’s inside (the HOW) in order to integrate WHAT you do with WHO you are (the WHAT + the WHO = the HOW) in a manner that is congruent to your own persona, philosophy and personality (the WHY).

Being an entrepreneur can be reduced to solving problems, issues and situations that arise (tactics), and the business per se is a meta-situation, where the entrepreneur is faced with a non-liner complex situation, looking for the innovative solution delivering value to its potential audience that will become the business.

What is there was a general framework to approach any problems? Not a solve-it-all equation, nor a silver bullet, just a framework from where to approach problems. Would it still be valid?
We believe so.

George Pólya’s 1945 book How to solve it has a genius-like approach to problem solving, voided from any content, and context rich, it might be one of today’s best kept strategy secrets of the best run companies in the world.

Here’s the general framework developed by George, revolving around four principles:

1. FIRST PRINCIPLE: UNDERSTANDING THE PROBLEM
   • You have to understand the problem.
   • What is the unknown? What are the data? What is the condition?
   • Is it possible to satisfy the condition? Is the condition sufficient to determine the unknown? Or is it insufficient? Or redundant? Or contradictory?
   • Draw a figure. Introduce suitable notation.
   • Separate the various parts of the condition. Can you write them down?
2. SECOND PRINCIPLE: DEVISING A PLAN
   • Find the connection between the data and the unknown. You may be obliged to consider auxiliary problems if an immediate connection cannot be found. You should obtain eventually a plan of the solution.
   • Have you seen it before? Or have you seen the same problem in a slightly different form?
   • Do you know a related problem? Do you know a theorem that could be useful?
   • Look at the unknown! And try to think of a familiar problem having the same or a similar unknown.
   • Here is a problem related to yours and solved before. Could you use it? Could you use its result? Could you use its method? Should you introduce some auxiliary element in order to make its use possible?
   • Could you restate the problem? Could you restate it still differently? Go back to definitions.
   • If you cannot solve the proposed problem try to solve first some related problem. Could you imagine a more accessible related problem? A more general problem? A more special problem? An analogous problem? Could you solve a part of the problem? Keep only a part of the condition, drop the other part; how far is the unknown then determined, how can it vary? Could you derive something useful from the data? Could you think of other data appropriate to determine the unknown? Could you change the unknown or data, or both if necessary, so that the new unknown and the new data are nearer to each other?
   • Did you use all the data? Did you use the whole condition? Have you taken into account all essential notions involved in the problem?
3. THIRD PRINCIPLE: CARRYING OUT THE PLAN
   • Carry out your plan.
   • Carrying out your plan of the solution, check each step. Can you see clearly that the step is correct? Can you prove that it is correct?
4. FOURTH PRINCIPLE: REVIEW / EXTEND
   • Examine the solution obtained.
   • Can you check the result? Can you check the argument?
   • Can you derive the solution differently? Can you see it at a glance?
   • Can you use the result, or the method, for some other problem?

It’s not often that we find books that were written over half a century ago, that are just as valid today as they were when they were first published. Such treasures are often forgotten or written off and can become part of any entrepreneur’s (unfair) competitive advantage portfolio.

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{Photography by Corey Ann}

Tags: Book, George Pólya, Unfair Competitive Advantage, Business Plan, Brainstorming, Process

It doesn’t fail, I had decided not to renew my HBR’s subscription and then I get the latest issue where the main article is pure gold. Which three articles have you read in your business life that deserve, in Olympic style, the Gold, Silver and Bronze Medal? Personally my Bronze medal goes to Alan Deutschman’s 2005 Change or Die. The silver Medal goes to Seth Godin’s 2003 In Praise of the Purple Cow , and now the Gold goes to Ed Catmull’s Creativity at PIXAR. Creativity at PIXAR is nothing less than the blueprint for Enterprise 3.0, encompassing Operations, Management, Strategy, Training, Talent, Management and sheer luck. All centered around creativity as practical strategy, with the background of Moore’s Living on the Fault Line, where functions that are not CORE are not part of the organization, the company is structured around fully integrated functions, like a 3-D puzzles, or a multi-dimensional (quantum) puzzle, where there are n-dimensions interconnected in more ways that it is visible or traceable, where the overall result is greater then the sum by a few orders of magnitudes. In a mature 2.0 business world, is your company still organized according to an org chart? How quaint! How 1.0. What can you do?

First you MUST read the article on PIXAR, it might make you think (again), it might make you ponder, it might make you angry, and be in awe. You might even hate it, and that’s ok too. If the article appeals to you and to your personality: make it part of yourself, make it part of your personal brand, and figure out a way you can deploy your new/changed vision into what you do.

Second, you can email the link to the article, or to this blog entry, to everyone you know, your boss (if you have one), partners, reports, investors. Blog about it, twit about it, FB-it, and let them know that you are open to talk and discuss its implications in what your do and in your relationship with them.

The third step depends on you and your company. If you are an entrepreneur in the making, this is going to be part of your DNA, and the DNA that you’ll pass onto your creation. If you are an Entrepreneur with a young start-up you are still in time to make these new ideas permeate into your company, into your people, and into everything you do, and most importantly in HOW you do “it”. If you are in charge of an establish company, change, real ecological change, takes virtually no time. It’s only the ripple effects of the change that take time to set in. If you work for an established company, and the corporate culture is on another planet from where PIXAR plays, you are in trouble. The article resonates with you and it has entered your thinking and expanded your worldviews; it’s going to be harder and harder waking up in the morning to go work which is just a job. The good news is that you hold the key, you have the solution to this dilemma, and you are in good company! Many employees are eager to fly solo and create something new, make a statement, and enrich people’s lives by creating a new brand. It still boils down to two points: plan and execute. Therefore – if that’s your situation – your first step will be to plan an exit route from your present situation. Will your inside view of your company, or of any organization for that matter, ever be the same?

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Photo Credits: tom.arthur

There’s a conspiracy of misinformation and half truths, one of them is the quote: “It’s not about you, it’s about the people that you choose to surround yourself with”. I believe consultants must have come up with this quote. It’s not wrong, it’s just that it is a 1/2 truth, for TWO main reasons:

1. Finding, convincing to join and retain top-notch employees & consultants is a rare skill and
2. Guiding these employees and consultant to follow the plan within the vision, and the guidelines is no small feat

Therefore, it is all about you, but not in a selfish way. Bill Gates surrounded himself of MVP (most valuable people), but he was the one with the vision, he saw what nobody else (who could execute) could see, and he sold to the team the concept to give 100% toward his vision. Sure he listened to everyone worth listening to along the way, incorporated thoughts and ideas into his own thoughts and ideas.

How does this affect you as the entrepreneur? It does, in many ways:

• The journey and the communication starts within you: not only WHAT you do, nor HOW you do it, but the essence of WHY you do it. Steve Job wanted to free people from using user unfriendly computers. Have you discovered the WHY you are an entrepreneur? is it only money?
• If it’s just money, that is the WHY and the WHO that will be the driving force of the business, that will determine the hiring that you will be doing (more WHO), your management style as well as theirs (HOW), the corporate culture of the company (HOW), the language and vocabulary that will show up over and over in emails, memos, web site copy, marketing collateral, and conversations (HOW).
• Strategy. Got a strategy to fulfill the vision, and a plan to achieve it. And if you don’t . . . that’s also a strategy, whether it is valid or invalid the point is mute, since it is part of the WHO you are. It would not be Debbie Fields, that Debbie that sold Mrs Fields Inc. for $800 million. Debbie said “if you don’t plan, plan on failing”.

Who are you? Who is the “WHO” reading this? If you are a successful entrepreneur and you are reading this, you already have your WHAT->HOW->WHO->WHY aligned.   If your company is not doing well and you believe you’ve given it enough time to mature, and it is still not working, you are in trouble: you’ve got your WHAT (your company products / services), you’ve got your HOW in place (brand, corporate culture, marketing, story, etc.), which are the product of a WHY that is not supporting the WHAT and the HOW, because it never went into realizing the WHO, which is you. What is your passion, what makes you tick, what makes you wake up at 5:00 AM before the alarm goes off, jump out of bed looking forward to work. Is it really work if you love it so much?

If you are an entrepreneur in the making you are in the best position, like a painter with a blank canvass you can paint any picture you want, you get to pick the theme, colors, tone, mood, and you can even cut the canvass Lucio Fontana’s style, and declare to the world that it is indeed a sculpture, not a painting. As an entrepreneur in the making, you don’t even have a canvass, you can go into any art form and medium of your choosing, and you can even make up your own art form or medium, and break all the rules there are and make then your own, John Cage did.

Business is indeed art.

And business is indeed the outmost form of self expression: think Steve Job and Apple, and how the iPod and iPhone is shaping and enhancing people’s lives, that is Art indeed.

WHO are you? What’s your art? What’s your voice? What’s your story? What’s your BRAND? Trutfully and congruently answer those questions to yourself, and that is just the beginning, the base for discovering the WHY, your WHY to entrepreneurship, which will lead to the HOW of doing things, which is going to be your own, and your own only style. From there it is a natural progress to build the WHAT, the vehicle that will carry forward your vision, the healthy WHO in the link WHO->WHY->HOW->WHAT.

You’ve got friends: Jackson, Walt, Paul, Ben & Jerry, Debbi.

When was the last time you were inspired? Randy Pausch did that for all of us. When was the last time you changed your mind about something that you used to look at as negative and tranformed it into a positive? Randy told us that brick walls, when things turns out harder than we had planned, are actually good things, because they offer us the chance to prove to ourselves how hard we want something, and keep the wishy-washy away from our goals; brick walls are necessary to cut down the competition from the good stuff. Randy’s is has moved from this world to his next, his imprint remains with us:

Interesting video of Moshe Safdie at TED. Notable is the conclusion, where – after quoting Theodore Cook – Moshe recites his own poem:

He who seeks Truth, shall find Beauty; he who seeks beauty, shall find vanity; he who seeks Order, shall find Gratification; he who seeks gratification, shall be disappointed; he who considers himself the servant of its fellow beings, shall find the Joy of Self Expression; he who seeks self expression, shall fall into the pit of arrogance; arrogance is incompatible with Nature; through Nature, the Nature of the Universe and the Nature of Men we shall seek truth; if we seek Truth, we shall find Beauty.

What does it take to build or run a business? Any business?

We believe it is quite simple(*), and we have reduced it to two activities:

1. Planning: as in deciding what to do (strategy) .
2. Executing: as in DOING IT (tactics).

In business there are four possible combinations of these two activities:

1. Bad execution of a good plan: leads to failure;
2. Bad execution of a bad plan: leads to failure;
3. Good execution of a bad plan: leads to failure;
4. Good execution of a good plan: the only way that leads to success;

Flexibility has be build into the process, but flexibility doesn’t mean that the during execution (the tactical portion of the business), the plan (the strategy) can be double-guessed and brought into question. Especially in start-up mode, or R&D, there’s great value in feedback. Arguably there’s more value in incorporating the knowledge of what doesn’t work and why, than knowing what works, without the knowledge of why.

(*) Simple does not mean easy.