WisdomGroup

You Can Do It Now

December 14, 2010 – By Raymond T. Hightower | 1 Comment

If you’re fortunate enough to work in technology, you’re in a field where you don’t need permission to move forward. So do it now

Yes, you’ll have to define “it” for yourself.

ChiPMA – Product Management
Last Thursday I had the pleasure of attending a meetup of the Chicago Product Management Association hosted by Pathfinder Development. The speaker: Suneel Gupta, VP of Product Development at Groupon.

You already know about Groupon and the (alleged) offer made by Google, so we won’t dwell on that here. Rather, this post will focus on the three points raised during Thursday’s talk:

1. Conditions are never perfect. So start now.
2. What does “start” mean? Draw out the plan.
3. If you suck at first, keep going.

Conditions are Never Perfect
Gupta is clearly a student of history. He began the talk by drawing parallels between today’s startup culture and the early days of powered flight.

Samuel Pierpont Langley was an accomplished engineer with great connections to money and resources. One of his lifelong goals was to develop a vehicle for powered flight. He built several successful models, hired the smartest collaborators he could find, and he even raised $50k (in 1898 dollars) from investors. Newspaper reporters followed his entourage as they conducted experiments. Surely, this team of thoroughbreds would solve the flight puzzle.

But most people have never heard of Langley. Somewhere in Ohio, far from the news outlets of the day, the Wright Brothers achieved the goal first. When Langley heard the news, he stopped trying.

Why did the Wright Brothers win? They never waited for perfect conditions. Maybe, just maybe constraints are advantages in disguise.

Draw Out the Plan
Everybody has dreams. Something magical happens when we take the time to draw out our dreams on paper.

Gupta’s example: Jack Dorsey, creator of Twitter. Dorsey drew the first mock-up for Twitter on paper. And then he showed it to people. Some laughed. Many gave feedback. He used the feedback to hone the idea into a viable product.

Until you put the idea on paper (or some other medium) so you can show it to potential customers and collaborators, you’ll never get the feedback you need to improve.

Keep Going
Gupta and his brother had an idea. They wanted to create videos about the first wave of Indians to move to America. They approached Hollywood experts about creating the videos.

“You’ll need at least $1 million”, they were told. Much too expensive. Most people fold when faced by a million dollar wall.

But Suneel and his brother made their own videos with the equipment they had available. Not a million-dollar production. But the here’s the upside: When they were done, they had something of substance that they could show to people. They posted their work at KahanMovement.com. One day, someone sent the link to Steven Spielberg.

Spielberg viewed the videos and he gave the brothers clear, actionable feedback. They made improvements. And they learned something interesting about Spielberg in the process: Even Spielberg starts with a “loose cut” sometimes! When he has a fresh idea that he’s trying to communicate, Spielberg will grab a hand-held camera, shoot the idea (no matter how rough) and show it to his team. If a picture is a thousand words, then a video is… you get the idea.

Teachers & Parents Ignite Our Passion
I’m a big fan of teachers and education and anything related to the two. Gupta shared a story about his 7th grade Social Studies class. The class watched a film of JFK delivering his inaugural speech in 1960. Gupta was moved. At the end of the film, the teacher informed that class that JFK had not written the speech. The author was Ted Sorensen, a man whom Kennedy called his “intellectual blood bank”.

In 7th grade, Gupta had found his calling. He would become a speech writer.

He went home and told his mother about his decision. And that’s when his mother gave him a powerful piece of advice: If you want to do that, you don’t have to wait. You can do it now.

You can do it now. What are you waiting for?