Businesses develop products to satisfy market / human needs. Attaining commercial success is crucial for business to thrive and constant course correction is crucial for success. We live in a dynamic world where everything around is evolving, the target markets are evolving, the target opportunity is evolving, the technologies one employ to find solutions are evolving and the human needs are evolving. The teams that do not course correct often find that they have missed the target by a long short and hence will never attain as large of commercial success compared to those who course correct often.
Constant course correction does not mean you keep changing the target all the time, resulting in change of course. If this happens one will never attain success because they are constantly changing and will never produce an impactful product because they could not lock on to a target. Constant course correction is a way to overcome inertia. Inertia is the single most leading cause for failure or death of great ideas even before they get started. Lack of clarity generally results in inertia. Teams and individuals hesitate to get started because they don’t have answers to all their questions. However, successful companies and projects get started because they greatly believe in the general direction and then they refine i.e. course correct to attain success.
Once you believe in general direction get started. Take massive action and get off the ground. As you attain more clarity, use your new learning and information to your advantage by constantly course correcting. This will result in two things,
1. You attained enough information that proves to you that your general direction is false. Then cut bait, stop, end your mission, conserve your left over resources and put them to best use on a different project. Capture your learning, learn from the experience and use it to your advantage in your next mission.
2. You attain greater conviction that your general direction is the right direction and your target is a valid target. Use your learning to course correct and attain end goal i.e. Big Bang Commercial success. Yahoo!!! Eureka !!! Yahoo !!!
Just like a guided missile that has locked on to a moving target needs to make constant course correction till it reaches the target. In a similar manner for a company or a project to succeed it has to make constant course correction to reach it’s target and attain commercial success.
Critical elements for Constant Course Correction:
1. Get Off The Ground:
The most essential element for success is to get started. To get started never wait for a perfect movement where you have all the answers but instead get started in a general direction based on your convection. The events you encounter in your journey will either strengthen your conviction or weaken it. During the course of the journey it is important to be true to oneself and see things as they are and not overly sugar coated nor to view them to be grim than they are. So, Get Started. Awake and arise and get started on the course you have most conviction.
2. Speed:
Second most important aspect after you get started is Speed. Speed of execution, speed of planning, speed of decision making and speed overall. Speed will give you un-due advantage compared to your competition because it make you learn your lessons faster, allows you to fail faster and rise back from the fall faster. Eventually speed allows you to reach your destination and create mind share.
Being first always has a special place in every profession. It gains mind share and free publicity. It shows the world you are special.
Various processes like six sigma that insist on quality, agile development practices in computer software industry or test based coding practices are all aimed at improving speed. It is not the process that is important but attaining speed and making sure the overhead is minimized is critical for business success. The ultimate intent of any of this process is to free the team, lessen the burden on the team and increase their changes of attaining success.
Web has changed the way software is developed and deployed. Gone are days where projects take years to complete. Gone are days where ideas take years to get prototyped. Welcome to the new order of web world of Speedy development and deployment where project is broken up into nibble size features that are developed, tested and pushed to production several times a week and in some cases several times a day. The size of these code segments could vary from project to project, however the most important aspect is to have a software architecture that allows such mode of development and deployment.
3. Dashboard:
Final component for constant course correction is a dashboard that shows how the project or product or the company is performing. The dashboard should be near real-time with ability to show historic view. The metrics reflected by this dashboard will never lie, however one needs to have the courage to see these metrics as they are. No worse and no better. Then go back to step #1 i.e. get started where you can analyze the dashboard and make required course correction and get started on this new path.
Facebook Story:
Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg with his college roommates and fellow computer science students. When Mark was attending school at Harvard, the school did not have a student directory with photos and basic information and the web site he created meet student need. It generated 450 visitors and 22,000 photo views in its first four hours. The website’s membership was initially limited to Harvard students. Over time it expanded to other colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, Stanford University, all university students, all high school students and finally to any one aged 13 and over. The website currently has more than 400 million active users worldwide.
It was important for Mark and his friends to take first step, make mistakes and not wait for answers to all the questions. It was even more important for them to continuously correct the course at an exponentially accelerated pace to attain success as outlined by time line below.
- February 4, 2004, Zuckerberg launched “The Facebook”. Membership was initially restricted to students of Harvard College, and within the first month, more than half the undergraduate students registered on the service.
- March 2004, Facebook expanded to Stanford, Columbia and Yale.
- Expansion continued as it allowed all Ivy League and Boston area schools, and gradually most universities in Canada and the United States.
- Facebook incorporated in the summer of 2004.
- June 2004, Facebook moved its base of operations to Palo Alto, California.
- The company dropped “The” from its name after purchasing the domain name facebook.com in 2005 for $200,000.
- Facebook launched high school version in September 2005.
- Facebook later expanded membership eligibility to employees of several companies, including Apple Inc, Microsoft.
- Facebook was then opened on September 26, 2006 to everyone over thirteen with a valid email address.
- In October 2008, Facebook announced that it will set up its international headquarters in Dublin, Ireland.
- Facebook experiment failed at few efforts but succeeded at those that matter the most, helping it to attain 400+ million users as I write this blog.
Facebook success was possible because they did not get bogged by the inertia and did not wait to find answers to every question. Instead they got started. They moved fast and course corrected often to attain great success. They are not yet perfect but perfection is a journey and not a destination. Always address the most important issues at hand and not the most urgent. Every successful start up, project, feature, team, has similar story to share. Success leaves a trail, anyone who as the ability to take these learning’s and incorporate them into their path will attain greater success in their next endeavor.
