The Theory and Practice of Good Enough

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One of my favorite and often used aphorisms is, “Perfection is the enemy of good.”

Very often the essence of a promising development is obscured by added features or over-refining of an idea.

This concept is usually attributed to Voltaire. Business leaders have nuanced it: Edward de Castro, one of the founders of Data General, said, “Not everything worth doing is worth doing well”.

This philosophy was wonderfully chronicled in Tracy Kidder’s “The Soul of a New Machine”.

The_soul_of_a_new_machine_--_book_cover

Case in point: the concept of the “minimum viable product” practiced thirty five years before the term.

Get the product in front of the customer now!

There Must Be a Pony Here Someplace …

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There are many versions of this story, which is often attributed to Ronald Reagan, but it also serves as a good metaphor for those in Product Development.

There are twin boys of five or six. Mom was worried that the boys had developed extreme personalities — one was a total pessimist, the other a total optimist — their parents took them to a psychiatrist.

First the psychiatrist treated the pessimist. Trying to brighten his outlook, the psychiatrist took him to a room piled to the ceiling with brand-new toys. But instead of yelping with delight, the little boy burst into tears. “What’s the matter?” the psychiatrist asked, baffled. “Don’t you want to play with any of the toys?” “No,” replied the pessimist, “I want a pony.”

Next the psychiatrist treated the optimist. Trying to dampen his outlook, the psychiatrist took him to a room piled to the ceiling with horse manure. But instead of wrinkling his nose in disgust, the optimist emitted just the yelp of delight the psychiatrist had been hoping to hear from his brother, the pessimist. Then he clambered to the top of the pile, dropped to his knees, and began gleefully digging out scoop after scoop with his bare hands. “What do you think you’re doing?” the psychiatrist asked, just as baffled by the optimist as he had been by the pessimist. “With all this manure,” the little boy replied, beaming, “there must be a pony in here somewhere.”

Very often the trick is indeed finding the pony!

The One Best Way (Part 2) The Grand Strategy:

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I admire leaders who are able to create a Grand Strategy. My admiration is boundless for those who actually succeed. By definition, it is very difficult to see how you are doing on a Grand Strategy until you are well along the path toward implementation. The path is full of doubt, questioning, and also requires a steadfast commitment by top management to stay-the-course.

Lou Gerstner IBM CEO

Louis Gerstner did this successfully at IBM in the 1990’s.

Unfortunately few managers are as gifted as Gerstner.

How many times have we seen companies destroyed by rigorously implementing the wrong plan? Management that bets-the-company on a strategy that would need years to determine success or failure are taking a huge, and in my mind, unnecessary risk.

Photo: “Lou Gerstner IBM CEO 1995” by Kenneth C. Zirkel – Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

The One Best Way (Part 1)

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Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856 – 1915) was one of the founders of scientific management and probably the first modern management consultant. He believed that all tasks could be reduced to “one best way”.

Captain Queeg in The Caine Mutiny (perhaps not one of literature’s great managers) said, “There are four ways of doing things on my ship. The right way, the wrong way, the Navy way, and my way. Do things my way and we will get along.”

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The next few posts will outline different approaches to new product development.

My question for the reader: do you think there is one best way, and if so what is it?

Needed – A Sense of Humor

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I have written about the difficult odds of success in product development.

Moving past failure requires a strong ego (something I will comment on specifically in a later post), but most of all, it takes a good sense of humor.

Sometimes it is not easy to find anything funny going on. The media seems to have downgraded humor into an attempt to shock or outrage.

Humor does not need to be this way.

Take a look at TED.

For those of you who are living too deeply in your lab, TED is a yearly conference bringing together some interesting people. While humor is only a small part of the conference, the organizers view it as important. So do I.

Humor can still be smart.