Category: Entrepreneurship (Page 2 of 12)

One of the challenges of teaching lies in helping students identify, confront and hopefully overcome their implicit assumptions and biases. When it comes to teaching innovation, this ranges from asking and answering questions such as

• What is innovation? Is it different from invention or creativity?
• Who is an innovator? Are they born or made?

In part to answer the second question, we do an exercise. Each student has to name two innovators of their choice and try to identify what attributes they’ve demonstrated as innovators. Much to my chagrin, year after year Steve Jobs and Elon Musk (more recently) are the first choices of most 19-year-olds that I teach. Thanks to my colleague Stephen Golden, later in the same class, we make them do an exercise around naming women or minority entrepreneurs. The exercise invariably results in both the students and I being surprised with the number of innovators that we should be aware of but aren’t.

In her book Mother of Invention: How Good Ideas Get Ignored in an Economy Built for Men Katrine Marçal brings up a related point. Not only do women entrepreneurs not get the visibility, but often inventions that seem to benefit primarily women do not easily gain traction. The particular example she cites is the matter of a wheeled suitcase.

The rolling suitcase is far from the only example. When electric cars first emerged in the 1800s they came to be seen as “feminine” simply because they were slower and less dangerous. This held back the size of the electric car market, especially in the US, and contributed to us building a world for petrol-driven cars. When electric starters for petrol-driven cars were developed they were also considered to be something for the ladies. The assumption was that only women were demanding the type of safety measures that meant being able to start your car without having to crank it at risk of injury. Ideas about gender similarly delayed our efforts to meet the technological challenges of producing closed cars because it was seen as “unmanly” to have a roof on your car.

Marçal, “Mystery of the Wheelie Suitcase.”

Studies show that this gender (and other forms of) bias, stretches beyond tech

• Research on women’s health gender race
• Access to public health
• Venture funding gender gap race gap

As with any problem that afflicts our communities or organization, the solutions have to begin with us. The first step is to educate ourselves and to begin conversations with others to both acknowledge the problem and to seek solutions. This post is a baby step and in future posts I’ll share both innovators who need to be known and what we can possibly do to address these inequities.

As I interviewed a variety of founders, lawyers and venture capitalists for The Art of a Happy Exit, the term coachability kept popping up. Tim McCarthy, who’d founded a marketing agency that helped chain restaurants improve their worst outlets  was the person who first brought this up to me. 

Tim, who sold his business in an all-cash transaction for 9-times EBITA, went on to start a non-profit as well work with young entrepreneurs. As most of entrepreneurs do, he jumped into both these activities feet first.

Tim who’s directly coached hundreds of entrepreneurs, learned the hard way about coachability. In his own words, “I wasted hundreds and hundreds of hours.” By that he meant he took every person or call that he came to him before realizing that most were coming to him for money but few were really prepared to listen. So he came up with a two simple questions that he must have an answer to before he’s prepared to spend serious time with someone seeking his inputs or help.

• Do they have listening skills? 
• Are they determined to change?

But answering even these questions require significant time. So he devised a simple process. They need to write, yep provide written answers to a template. Tim won’t commit to anyone who won’t write. This in many ways leads to self-selection with only 10% of those seeking help willing to do the writing work. Tim has also begun gathering them in peer groups, along with other folks seeking help. As Tim wryly puts it “They quickly tire of hearing me speak!”

Tim is one of the entrepreneurs featured in my book, The Art of A Happy Exit – How Successful Entrepreneurs Sell Their Businesses.

The wife and I snuck away without the kids to the temple town of Kumbakonam, in Tamil Nadu. While visiting living temples dating back the 8th to the 12th c. CE was both awe-inspiring and humbling, the shower stall in our hotel had its own lessons. I’ve written in past about baffling designs we’ve encountered here, here and here.

I’ve never ceased to be surprised by the constant “innovation” faucet makers insist on foisting on us. Somehow hotels seem particularly vulnerable to the siren call of such innovations. On more than one occasion I’ve had to dash into the bathroom, when a hapless friend or spouse screamed from the shower. For Psycho fans, it was never a man with a knife, but invariably hot (or cold) water suddenly spewing on their head or their feet, when they expected nothing of the kind. Invariably turning, pulling, pushing, yanking up/down, seemed to do utterly different things in these showers. If this was not confusing enough, in the hotel in Kumbakonam, I encountered this faucet.

Fearful of getting cold water dumped on my head, I gingerly began turning knobs. This [Faucet] [Left] [Middle][Right] arrangement had me wondering if Left = Hot? and Right = Cold? and Middle = Shower? Or L=H, M=C, R=S? Did the fact that the Faucet was in the left rather than between the knobs less confusing or more? I don’t know about you, but figuring this out, at 5AM, without of a stitch of clothing on is not exactly fun. Of course none of the knobs had any markings, nor did they provide any affordance whether they’d turn 90 or 180 degrees.

It turned out that the left most knob—the one closest to the faucet—switches from faucet to shower. It of course turns 180 deg, so you can never tell, whether it is set to shower or faucet, till you turn the water on! The middle knob is HOT and the right most is COLD, maintaining the common left/right protocol for hot & cold.

Any shower design that requires your spouse to experiment and explain how to work it is a #fail in my opinion.

This was clearly a case of a product designer trying too hard to differentiate with little regard for a poor, naked, shivering customer’s plight. What would you have done differently?