“I've failed over and over and over again in my life and that is why I succeed.” – Michael Jordan
I once read an article where the authors had analyzed a lot of new product introductions to find the significant success factors. Was it the time spent planning? Was it the marketing budget? Was it the years of experience of the team introducing the idea?
It turns out that the authors could not find a single variable that predicted success. Rather, they found that roughly one in three ideas succeeded, no matter what preparation went into the idea!
I happen to not entirely believe that this “one-in-three, no matter what preparation” is true – but I don’t entirely disbelieve it, either. I suspect that a bit of thought can often spark really good ideas, and quickly eliminate really bad ones.
What separates the winners from the losers is not that the winners are always smart enough to have good ideas – even the smartest people and companies have losing ideas.
Microsoft is perhaps the smartest and winningest company of the last 20 years: yet most of the hundreds of products that Microsoft has produced have been economic failures. Some have been embarrassing failures. Yet Microsoft thrives precisely because it realizes that it will often fail, and thus the path to success is to try, and try again. The following excerpt of Bill Gates’ keynote speech to the 1998 Consumer Electronics Show illustrates this point well:
“Now, I think it's valuable to remember that not all the great new products here go on to be a success. I know many years ago, John Sculley came and talked about digital convergence, a trillion-dollar market, and introduced Newton. That product proved to be a little bit ahead of its time, [which] was probably tough on his career. Four years ago, I came and introduced a product called Microsoft Bob. Now, Microsoft Bob sold even less than the Newton. And so, I must have a more forgiving board of directors than John Sculley had, because here I am trying again with some great new products.”
The winners of the world are those folks who are able to:
Life is finite, so why not spend our time on big ideas? Over time, I’ve come to conclude that one can spend as much time making a success of a big idea as a small one – so one might as well take a crack at the big one. This requires a bit of self-confidence, as big ideas, when they miss, will be big, visible misses. C’est la vie.
But be careful about things, for example, which violate the laws of physics (e.g., perpetual motion machines) or that are patently absurd: for example, I was once asked to look at a proposal to contain toxic waste at a site by pumping enough current through the ground to fuse the soil into some sort of glass. I know nothing about the physics of fusing soil into glass, but I could use the proposal’s own numbers to determine that they needed about half the output of an average power plant for several months to do what they wanted: the idea was scrapped.
Also be careful of “experts” – they are often right, but often wrong. Referring back to Bill Gate’s quote above, a perfect example is the PDA (Personal Digital Assistant), those little electronic marvels that hold your phone book, calendar, to-do lists, and other stuff. Probably a dozen or more versions of these gadgets were brought to market before 1996, and they all failed miserably, the Apple Newton being the most spectacular. After 10 or so years of unrelenting failure, the “experts” absolutely knew that PDAs would never be successful.
Then some very smart people who founded Palm Computing proved the “experts” wrong: it wasn’t that PDAs couldn’t be successful – rather it was that bad PDAs couldn’t be successful. The Palm was the first PDA that delivered what users wanted, and so it became a great success.
"All my life I've known better than to depend on the experts. How could I have been so stupid, to let them go ahead?" - President John F. Kennedy (in conversation with Theodore C. Sorensen concerning the Bay of Pigs)
Almost any idea can achieve wild success in the minds of the inventors and investors – just look at the now-defunct dot-com craze. No amount of thought can substitute for reality. In the real world, there is what Van Clausewitz calls “The fog of battle”, or what my dad calls “the law of unanticipated consequences”. Trying a concept in the real world will turn up a bunch of unanticipated consequences, good and bad.
Note that one need not go full-throttle hell-bent-for-leather on getting ideas out the door. There are several stages between idea and full-bore product launch, ranging from having friends and acquaintances try the product, to running a city or two or three as a test market. Each of these can give you valuable (although imperfect) information, and it’s usually a good idea to quickly run through these.
This is possibly the most difficult step, the one that is least commonly done well. The key here is to accurately judge what is happening when concept meets real world, and to make a decision:
There is no perfect formula for determining which category a tested concept falls into. In the best of circumstances, results will meet or exceed our expectations, and it’s time to press forward. However, this is usually not the case – more often, results are below our expectations, in categories 2 or 3.
When a tested concept falls into categories 2 or 3, it can be difficult to:
Determine if it is a category 2 or 3.
If it is a category 3, then what do we do to improve performance in the marketplace?
These are not easy to decide – in fact, I think it is the place where the greats are separated from the also-rans.
Put your best thinking, and the thinking of the smartest folks you know, into determining what needs to be changed. Make sure the changes are real changes – many folks are so glued to their original concept, either out of ego or fear, that they reheat the same concept and pretend that it is different.
Does the concept play better in the marketplace this time? Try it and see!
As we've seen, most concepts are losers. Finding a winner is something special, and should be taken very seriously and pushed forward without delay – why wait?
There is an additional reason for haste: anything you can do, someone else can likely do in relatively short time. Very few concepts are protectable enough to afford waiting. Once a concept is shown to be a winner, it’s time to “go for the kill”. It is not time for caution and waiting around. Move it out and scale it up as quickly and strongly as possible.