What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20 (6 page)

After the interview process, each person designs and builds a new wallet for the other person—his or her “customer.” The design materials include nothing more than paper, tape, markers, scissors, paper clips, and the like. They can also use whatever else they find in the room. This takes about thirty minutes. After they’ve completed the prototype, they “sell” it to their customer. Almost universally, the new wallet solves the biggest problems with which the customer was struggling. They’re thrilled with the concept and say that if that wallet were available, they would buy it. Some of the features are based on science fiction, such as a wallet that prints money on demand, but some require little more than a good designer to make them feasible right away.

Many lessons fall out of this exercise. First, the wallet is symbolic of the fact that problems are everywhere, even in your back pocket. Second, it doesn’t take much effort to uncover these problems. In fact, people are generally happy to tell you about their problems. Third, by experimenting, you get quick and dirty feedback on the solutions you propose. It doesn’t take much work, many resources, or much time. And, finally, if you aren’t on the right track with a solution, the sunk cost is really low. All you have to do is start over.
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I’ve run this exercise with small groups, with large groups, with kids, with doctors, and with business executives. In all cases they’re surprised by the simplicity of realizing that there are always things that can be improved—from wallets and shoelaces to backpacks, software, restaurants, gas stations, cars, clothes, coffee shops…the list is endless. You don’t need someone else to give you this assignment. In fact, all successful entrepreneurs do this naturally. They pay attention at home, at work, at the grocery store, in airplanes, at the beach, at the doctor’s office, or on the baseball field, and find an array of opportunities to fix things that are broken.

The wallet design exercise focuses on product design. But you can use the same approach to rethink services, experiences, and organization structures. At the d.school, the teaching team crafts projects that charge the students with completely rethinking an amazingly wide range of experiences, from primary school education in the United States to irrigation of crops in rural India and management of innovative organizations. If you study each situation with an eye for improvement, you will find countless opportunities. It is then up to you to decide if you will put yourself in the position to take on that challenge.

Some people are masters at taking on challenges and seizing leadership roles. I learned a lot about this from David Rothkopf, author and CEO of Garten Rothkopf, a Washington, DC–based international advisory firm, whose book
Superclass
focuses on those people in the world who have more power and influence than the rest of us.
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David studied leaders who’ve made it to the inner circle, interacting with one another in the elite World Economic Forum that meets annually in Davos, Switzerland. I asked David what sets these people apart from the rest of us. He echoed many of the things that others in this book mentioned: people who get to the top work harder than those around them, they have more energy that propels them forward, and they’re markedly more driven to get there. He notes that in the past people in the inner circle inherited their wealth and access. But today that isn’t the case. The majority of people who claim great success have made it happen on their own. This means that the primary barriers to success are self-imposed. The corollary to this is, as David says, “The biggest ally of superachievers is the inertia of others.”

David actually embodies these characteristics himself, naturally seizing opportunities, as opposed to waiting for others to hand them to him. His first company was called International Media Partners, and one of their activities was organizing conferences for top CEOs. The looming question for this startup was how to get all those exclusive and elusive executives in the same room. David and his partners needed a tempting hook, and decided that getting Henry Kissinger to speak would do the trick. But how would they get Henry Kissinger to participate? David found out how to reach Kissinger’s office and asked Kissinger’s staff if he was available to speak at the conference. No problem…but it would cost $50,000, require a private airplane with two pilots, and a chauffeured limousine. David and his team didn’t have any money, so any amount was too much…but he said, “Yes, we’ll do it.” He assumed that if he could get Henry Kissinger in the room, then the rest would fall neatly into place—and it did! Once Kissinger accepted, they were able to secure Alexander Haig, Secretary of State under President Reagan; then Edmund Muskie, Secretary of State under Jimmy Carter; followed by a long list of other well-known speakers. With this list of luminaries, the CEOs showed up in droves and the company was able to get sponsors who more than paid for all the speaking fees. The fact that David didn’t know Henry Kissinger and had no money didn’t get in his way. He succeeded by creatively leveraging what he did have—his energy, his willingness to work hard, and his drive to make it happen.

The story goes on from here. David’s colleague at International Media Partners, Jeffrey Garten, went on to become Undersecretary of Commerce during the first Clinton administration. He invited David to become Deputy Undersecretary of Commerce for International Trade. It seemed like a pretty plum position. He had a huge office and a big staff. But after two weeks David walked into Jeff’s office and quit. He couldn’t stand the bureaucratic environment. Everything was painfully slow and David was impatient to make things happen. Jeff took David outside for a walk and told him the following joke:

There was once a man named Goldberg who wanted nothing more than to be rich. So each day he went the synagogue and prayed to God to win the lottery. This went on for days, weeks, months, and years, but Goldberg never won. Eventually, Goldberg was at his wit’s end. Praying to God, he said, “You have really let me down.” Suddenly the silence was broken and God responded in a booming voice, “Goldberg, you’ve got to help me out here. You could at least buy a ticket!”

Jeff reminded David of something he already knew—he wasn’t going to “win the lottery” in Washington if he didn’t engage. Nobody was going to hand him the tools to be successful. So David went back to his office and tapped into his natural instincts to make things happen, as opposed to waiting for someone to show up with a game plan. He quickly realized that there were endless holes to be filled and tremendous resources at his disposal. In a wonderful finale, several years after David left the Department of Commerce he became the managing director of Kissinger Associates, Inc. He went from being a newcomer who dreamed of being in the same room with Henry Kissinger to joining him as a business partner.

David has seen this story play out again and again in his own life and in the lives of those he has studied while researching his book. Those who are successful find ways to make themselves successful. There is no recipe, no secret handshake, and no magic potion. Each person he studied has a story as unique as a fingerprint. The consistent theme is that they each pay attention to current trends and leverage their own skills to build their influence. They find ways to sway history, as opposed to waiting for history to sway them.

If you want a leadership role, then take on leadership roles. Just give yourself permission to do so. Look around for holes in your organization, ask for what you want, find ways to leverage your skills and experiences, be willing to make the first move, and stretch beyond what you’ve done before. There are always opportunities waiting to be exploited. Instead of waiting to be asked and tiptoeing around an opportunity, seize it. It takes hard work, energy, and drive—but these are the assets that set leaders apart from those who wait for others to anoint them.

I require my students to write a failure résumé. That is, to craft a résumé that summarizes all their biggest screwups—personal, professional, and academic. For every failure, each student must describe what he or she learned from that experience. Just imagine the looks of surprise this assignment inspires in students who are so used to showcasing their successes. However, after they finish their résumé, they realize that viewing experiences through the lens of failure forced them to come to terms with the mistakes they have made along the way. In fact, as the years go by, many former students continue to keep their failure résumé up-to-date, in parallel with their traditional résumé of successes.

I borrowed this assignment from Liz Kisenwether at Penn State University. When I first heard the idea I thought it was terrific. It’s a quick way to demonstrate that failure is an important part of our learning process, especially when you’re stretching your abilities, doing things the first time, or taking risks. We hire people who have experience not just because of their successes but also because of their failures. Failures offer learning opportunities and increase the chance that you won’t make the same mistake again. Failures are also a sign that you have taken on challenges that expand your skills. In fact, many successful people believe that if you aren’t failing sometimes then you aren’t taking enough risks. Prodded by a former student, I decided to include here my own abbreviated failure résumé, showcasing some of my biggest mistakes. I wish I had kept this résumé up-to-date for the past thirty years. It would have been fascinating to revisit and learn from all the mistakes I’ve conveniently put out of my mind.

TINA L. SEELIG

Professional Failures

Not paying attention:
Early in my career I naively thought I knew how organizations worked. I made judgments about corporate culture that were incorrect. I wish I had spent more time paying attention and less time making assumptions.

Quitting too early:
While running my own business I hit the wall. It got incredibly hard both technically and organizationally, and was going to take a tremendous amount of effort to find my way to a solution. I wish I had been confident enough to fully commit to finding a solution.

Academic Failures

Not doing my best:
The first two years of college I didn’t put my focused effort into all my courses. I missed the chance to extract the most value from the classes—a chance I can’t get back.

Relationship management:
I had a challenging relationship with my PhD advisor. I wanted to spend a lot of time teaching and she felt I should spend most of my time in the lab. I wish I had found a way to better align our goals.

Personal Failures

Avoiding conflicts:
I had a boyfriend in college, and as we closed in on graduation we were both stressed about where we were going next. Instead of dealing with the questions directly, I blew up the relationship. I wish I had been able to talk honestly about what was going on.

Not listening to my gut:
My uncle died in New York. I lived in California and several people urged me not to travel to the funeral. I have always regretted it. I learned that there are some things you can’t undo, and that in situations such as these I should do what is right for me, not necessarily what others want me to do.

Willingness to take risks and reactions to failure differ dramatically around the world. In some cultures the downside for failure is so high that individuals are allergic to taking any risks at all. These cultures associate shame with any type of failure, and from a young age people are taught to follow a prescribed path with a well-defined chance of success, as opposed to trying anything that might lead to disappointment. In some places, such as Thailand, someone who has failed repeatedly might even choose to take on a brand-new name in an attempt to reboot his or her entire life. In fact, in the 2008 Olympics, a Thai weight lifter attributed her victory to changing her name before the games.

The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM),
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which publishes a detailed annual report on startup activity around the world, looks at cultural differences in risk taking and comfort with failure. The GEM team found that important factors contribute to a society’s risk profile. For example, in some countries, such as Sweden, the bankruptcy laws are designed such that once your company goes out of business you can never get out of debt. Knowing that failure has drastic, long-term consequences for you and your family is a huge disincentive to try to start a company in the first place. The culture in other countries is equally unforgiving. Once you fail, your friends, neighbors, and colleagues will always view you as a failure. A recent issue of the
Wall Street Journal
describes humiliating tactics currently used by debt collectors in several countries, including Spain.
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The collectors literally show up at individuals’ houses in bizarre costumes, with the goal of drawing attention from the neighbors and shaming the debtors. Why would anyone in these communities risk public ridicule by taking on any unnecessary risk?

This is in sharp contrast to Silicon Valley, where failure is acknowledged as a natural part of the process of innovation. Steve Jurvetson,
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a partner at the venture firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson, describes failure as the secret sauce of Silicon Valley, while Randy Komisar of KPCB notes that being able to view failure as an asset is the hallmark of an entrepreneurial environment. Randy also says that when he sees people who have never had a failure, he wonders what they have really learned from their experiences.

On the most basic level, all learning comes from failure. Think of a baby learning to walk. He or she starts out crawling and then falling before finally mastering the skill that as an adult we take for granted. As a child gets older, each new feat, from catching a baseball to doing algebra, is learned the same way, by experimenting until you are finally successful. We don’t expect a child to do everything perfectly the first time, nor should we expect adults who take on complex tasks to get it all right the first time, either.

I’ve come to believe that the most powerful learning comes from experiencing failures as well as successes. It is also nearly impossible to learn anything without doing it yourself, by experimenting along the way, and by recovering from the inevitable failures. You can’t learn to play soccer by reading the rulebook, you can’t learn to play the piano by studying sheets of music, and you can’t learn to cook by reading recipes. I’m reminded of my time as a graduate student in neuroscience. I had taken several courses in which we “learned” the principles of neurophysiology. Although I could pass a written test on the material, it wasn’t until I was in the lab, dissecting nerves under a microscope, impaling them with tiny electrodes, and manually turning the dials on the oscilloscope, that I fully understood the concepts. Likewise, you can read as many books on leadership as you want, but until you experience the challenges that face real leaders, you will never be prepared to take charge.

The Mayfield Fellows Program, which I co-direct with Tom Byers, a professor in Management Science and Engineering at Stanford, gives students this opportunity.
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After one quarter of classroom work, during which we offer an in-depth introduction to entrepreneurship through case studies, the twelve students in this nine-month program spend the summer working in startup companies. They take on key roles in each business and are closely mentored by senior leaders in the company. They experience firsthand what it is like to identify and address the white-hot risks that face each organization, the stresses of making decisions with incomplete information, and the challenge of leading in an ever-changing environment. After the intense summer experience, the students come back to class for ten weeks of debriefing about what happened in their respective companies. Each student leads a class on an important issue that evolved during their internship.

The students in the Mayfield Fellows Program have profound insights about what it means to run a fast-paced business in a dynamic environment. They watch these companies struggle with issues such as running out of cash, retooling after a change in the senior management team, the challenge of getting cutting-edge technology to work, and the daunting task of competing against giants in the industry. By the end of the summer, the students realize that only a handful of the companies for which they worked will be in business in a year or two. Despite all of the efforts of talented teams, many of them will fail.

The entire venture capital industry essentially invests in failures, since the majority of the companies they fund eventually go under. Other industries have a similar success rate, including the toy industry, the movie business, and the publishing industry. Consider book publishing: According to Nielsen Bookscan, of the approximately 1.2 million different books in print in 2004, only 25,000, or 2 percent, sold more than 5,000 copies, and the average book in the U.S., sells less than 500 copies. However, it is nearly impossible to predict which ones will be the big hits. As a result, publishers continue to produce many different books, hoping that each will be a success but knowing that only a tiny fraction will make it onto the bestseller list. Publishers, toy makers, movie producers, and venture capitalists understand that the path to success is littered with failures.

Mir Imran, a serial entrepreneur, has started dozens of companies, many in parallel.
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His success rate has been remarkable, considering that in almost every environment most startups fail. When asked about his success rate, Mir admits that the key is killing projects early. He uses a brutal process to weed out projects with a low likelihood of success and puts increased energy into those with a high likelihood of making it to the finish line. He uses considerable discipline and analysis in the early stages, prior to launching a new venture, to increase the chances that it will thrive in the long run.

Even though it is always difficult to abandon a project, it is much easier in the early stages of a venture, before there is an enormous escalation of committed time and energy. This happens in all parts of our lives, including jobs, stock investments, and any type of relationship. Leonardo da Vinci once stated, “It is easier to resist at the beginning than at the end.” Bob Sutton, an expert on organizational behavior, describes “The Da Vinci Rule” in detail in his book,
The No Asshole Rule,
where he talks about leaving jobs that are not a good match as soon as you discover they are untenable.
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Here he generalizes this much more broadly:

Although most people know that sunk costs shouldn’t be considered in making a decision, the “too-much-invested-to-quit syndrome” is a powerful driver of human behavior. We justify all the time, effort, suffering, and years and years that we devote to something by telling ourselves and others that there must be something worthwhile and important about it or we never would have sunk so much of our lives into it.

Quitting is actually incredibly empowering. It’s a reminder that you control the situation and can leave whenever you like. You don’t have to be your own prison guard, keeping yourself locked up in a place that isn’t working. But that doesn’t mean quitting is easy. I’ve quit jobs that were a bad match and abandoned failing projects, and in each case it was terribly difficult. We’re taught that quitting is a sign of weakness, although in many circumstances, it’s just the opposite. Sometimes quitting is the bravest alternative, because it requires you to face your failures and announce them publicly. The great news is that quitting allows you to start over with a clean slate. And, if you take the time to evaluate what happened, quitting can be an invaluable learning experience.

When Randy Komisar left his vice president position at Claris, a computer software company that spun out of Apple Computer, he felt he had failed. Randy, who had a clear vision of what he wanted to accomplish, left Claris when he realized he was never going to achieve his goals. Randy’s “failure” was very public, and it stung badly. However, within a short time Randy realized that being released from this job provided him with an opportunity to reevaluate his passions and determine how he could best use his skills. For instance, it became clear that one reason he felt so dissatisfied at Claris was that he was neither passionate about the product nor about what he was doing. He loved thinking about the company’s big picture and scoping out its vision, but he was hardly inspired by the day-today management issues.

When Randy was asked to become CEO of a new company, he suggested instead that he work
with
the CEO to set the direction for the company. In this way he crafted a brand-new role for himself—“Virtual CEO”—and was subsequently able to become involved with dozens of companies, many at the same time. He served as a coach, sounding board, and advisor for CEOs, but didn’t have the day-to-day responsibilities. This suited him and the companies well. “The failure allowed me to better align my passions with the opportunities around me,” says Randy. This is a poignant reminder that learning when to call it quits is crucial. You need to know when to stop pounding on an idea that isn’t working and when to move on to something new.

There are actually many ways to turn a failure into a success. One memorable story about transforming a big disappointment into a big win came out of the Innovation Tournament in which students had to create value from rubber bands in five days. One team decided to create a “Wishing Tree.” They identified a tree in the center of campus, across from the university bookstore, and wrapped the trunk with chicken wire. They then used rubber bands to attach messages to the chicken wire. The idea was that anyone passing by could post a wish on the tree. The team promoted it widely, using online networking sites, e-mail lists, and by literally standing in front of the tree, inviting passersby to post a wish. Unfortunately, people just weren’t interested.