Establish Control and Let It Go

This weeks reading of Good to Great by Jim Collins introduced us to his culture of discipline. Collins’ displayed his distaste for bureaucratic cultures, saying they arise to compensate for incompetence and the lack of the desired culture of discipline, which all arises from having the wrong people in your organization. The culture of discipline necessary to take a company from good to great balances on a conceptually fragile duality. To be ultimately effective, your organization must require people to adhere to a consistent system, yet also allow them the freedom and responsibility to act to their full potential. Jim Collins tells us that to build a truly great organization we must cultivate a culture of people who take disciplined action within the three circles of the previously mentioned Hedgehog Concept, being that one knows and works in what they are deeply passionate about, what they are the best at, and are focused on driving their personal economic engine. This corollary and the previously stated connection to the concept of having the right people “on the bus” made this chapter ultimately a culmination of many previous points, forming the framework of Collins’ ultimate image of a “Good-to-Great Company.”

As in all walks and aspects of life, many mechanisms in the ideal Good-to-great company hinge on balance. This chapter’s key example of necessary balance is that of cultivating an environment in which your workers will do their best work. When managing an organization of your creation, you already know that your workers are qualified and have potential for their relative position, because that far along in the process you would have been the one to hire them. Once you have gotten these right people in the right seats on the bus, it is your job as a leader, to cultivate a setting which cultivates prime productivity by establishing standards and from there giving workers free and unhindered range to what you hired them to do. It is a true sign of your control over a situation when you know you can let go and are confident that great things will happen.

The Hedgehog Concept and Our Futures

This weeks reading of Jim collins’ Good to Great brought us the Hedgehog Concept. The Hedgehog Concept is not a goal, strategy, or intention, it is an understanding. It is an understanding of what your organization can be the best at, not what it wants to be the best at. The book consistently uses the term “best in the world”, but if you aren’t already the head of an established company, etc. you will have to break down this lesson to relate it to your own life. The Hedgehog concept is the convergence of hat you can be the “best in the world” at, what you are deeply passionate about, and what drives your economic engine. If an organization reaches this understanding, and proceeds upon it rather than on pure bravado, it will find true success. The book compares good-to-great companies with failed companies with an analogy of hedgehogs and foxes. The Good-To-Great companies were like hedgehogs, simple and focused that knew “one big thing” and stuck to it. The comparison companies were more like foxes, as in they were crafty, cunning, and knew many different things yet lacked consistency. To be a successful hedgehog, stay focused on few things and be the best at those things, rather than spreading yourself too thin.

Regardless of the fact that this lesson is directed to up-and-coming business people searching for success in their various industries, it is also a timely concept for all of us seniors as we make our college decisions and eventually our career decisions. Now that we have gotten accepted to the schools we are going to be accepted by, the following month is our time to make our final decision that will lay the groundwork for the backdrop of the next four years of our lives. In this process we can take into consideration the Hedgehog Concept. We have to come to an understanding of what we want out of college. If it is your desire to be a big fish in a small pond, then you would consider going to the college where you could be the best. But you also must take into account how passionate you are about each of your options, no one wants to be bored for the next four years. The concept of finding “what drives your economic engine” has two iterations in this context. First you must consider how much the school is going to cost you, as an economic component to your fiscal future after school a daunting debt can be a real detractor. One could also consider the average salary of the school’s graduates after 10 years as well as the general ROI of attending the school. Taking these aspects into consideration will truly set you up for success in and after college.

A Delicate Delivery of the Brutal Facts

This weeks reading of Good to Great by Jim Collins focused on confronting the brutal facts of your given situation and adjusting from there  to become great . He states that all the good-to-great companies that he researched and compiled into this book began their process of launching into greatness by first confronting forthright facts about their current reality. Outside the sphere of the business world, the fact that when you start with an honest and diligent effort to determine the truth of your situation, the right decisions often become evident, is useful and true in everyday life. The chapter comes to a masterful crescendo with the explanation of the Stockdale Paradox: One must retain absolute faith that you can and will prevail in the end, regardless of the difficulties, and at the same time confront the most brutal facts of your current reality.  All of these lessons are transcribable to my current situation in my quarter 3 project.  Now that I have gotten verbal approval from the head of the Visual Arts Department, Ms. Mitchell, I can now begin spitballing ideas with her in an open communication stream so that we can truly collaborate in an effort to cultivate a successful art gallery. As an outsider to the department I can offer a fresh perspective to Ms. Mitchell as we try to attract more students from the mainstream to join Visual Arts classes. One piece that I want to be brutally honest about but need to maintain a polite and submissive composure in delivering are my thoughts on the Art Space. Ms. Sartanowicz described to me the Visual Arts Department largely being ignored by the rest of the school, and being slowly and slowly pushed further into obscurity away in the UA building, the Art Space is the Visual Arts Department’s last foothold in the main building. When I talked to Ms. Mitchell she heartily defended the Art Space as being nearly sufficient in giving mainstream students proper exposure to what the department has to offer. I remember her telling me that she believes that a sizable portion of  BHS students go to and experience the art space on a regular basis. From my experience in the mainstream this simply isn't true. I hear very little of people going there and very little in promotion of the space. This is a harsh reality that I think is vital to address in the process to bringing the Visual Arts department the exposure it deserves. The true key here is that for this project to be successful I need to be bold in relaying what I see as the harsh facts, but delivering them in a way that keeps the communications constructive instead of combative,  

Leave an Anonymous Legacy in the Infrastructure of Your Organization

This weeks reading of Good To Great  by Jim Collins taught me a valuable lesson in project management. The overlying message of the passage was that  good-to-great leaders began their transformations by first getting the right people on the bus (and the wrong people off the bus) and then figuring out where to drive it. Rather, the “who” questions come before the “what” questions. Before vision, before strategy, before organization structure, before tactics. The idea is that a company, or any organization, is going to have to pivot when the time comes, and having people on board for the sake of being on board, rather than being there for a specific idea, will keep them around when it comes time to head in a new direction. It is also vital to know that having the right people in the right positions is what will really get your organization off the ground, because just getting the correct people in a room together and inciting rigorous debate can put you on the right track to solving almost any problem. This teaching is very relevant to my project in C4E this quarter, as having a strong connection with all of the correct personnel assets in the Art Department will be vital to having a successful gallery. A main fear amongst the teachers in the department is that I, as a soon-to-be-graduating senior, want to build an “ annual” art gallery, that I won’t be around to organize and manage any year past this one, leaving the responsibility to them. The faculty of the UA already teach 5 classes relative to the regular academic minimum of 4, so they are relatively overworked as it is, and from there I can see how the thought of taking on any more work would be worrying. I need to not think of this project as the “solo project” I have been deeming it and think of it more as an organization, in the sense that my main priority should be balanced between having a solid gallery this year, but leaving the organization in such a way that it will flourish and be even better next year in my absence. To achieve this I will do all of the work I possibly can to make this years gallery as easy as it can be on the faculty members while still enlisting their excitement and support, and at the same time make it easily duplicated when next year comes around. If I hammer out all of the contacts for catering, venue, date, etc. come next year all they will have to do is hit redial.

Be the Workhorse, not the Showhorse

For this quarter’s slew of blogging assignments I decided to read Good To Great by Jim Collins. The first chapter of this book focuses on what makes someone a prime candidate to lead the next “great” organization. I say organization because enforces the idea that the ideas written within transcend relevance beyond purely business means. The “Level 5” leader that the first chapter describes would be  an effective leader no matter the setting. This kind of leader is described as someone who leads with the fluid paradox of being overcome with professional will but being grounded in personal humility. A “Level 5” leader is someone who creates the superb results necessary to transform a company from good to great, but is never boastful and shuns public admiration and credit. A key component of being one of these leaders is that you always have to place the company before yourself, that means taking fault for the failures and outsourcing credit for the successes. It also means having enough dignity and pride to make sure that your successor to the leadership position is better and more capable than you ever were, it is not your namesake that matters, but rather the institution’s as a whole. This chapter resonated with me as I pursue this solo project for quarter 3, because I see myself as having the opportunity to be a “Level 5” leader. My goal for the project is to create an annual Art Festival to celebrate the art, culture, and faculty of the Visual Arts department of the high school. The problem I see with the community as it currently stands is that there is all this great art being produced and there is very little publicity and school attention on it. My goal is to create a publicized event open to the school where this appreciation can manifest. My colleagues in this scenario are the faculty of the Art department, but I as a student who has one block a day devoted solely to this project, will have a good amount of available time to focus on this than they will. In the end I want to create an event that celebrates the Art department, so I will follow Collins’ teachings and do my best work, staying behind the scenes. The last thing I want to do is give the teachers the impression that I am doing this for my own glory, and the fact that I am a newcomer gives that a realistic chance. I will work to make the festival the best it can be, and maintain and ensure my humility to the faculty of the department.

Godin's Words Seen in Everyday Life

This final week of reading Seth Godin’s The Purple Cow has lead me to his overarching message for the entire book, “Explore the limits and become a Purple Cow.” Early on in the book Godin foretells of a slow and bitter end to the modern ways of advertising and marketing. Our lives have become oversaturated with consumer goods and almost all of our basic human needs and wants have been fulfilled, so mass-marketing has become less and less effective. Too many companies are attempting to build products that remain within the herd, battling their other competitors for a short and never-sweet-enough second in the spotlight. Capitalistic Darwinism has been in effect for many decades now, but it is unable to be as harsh and respect-demanding as it once was. Today, most companies worth their salt are parts of massive industrial conglomerates that have billions in cushion-funding available to protect them from any failed venture that would lose in an exhibition of survival-of-the-fittest. This lesson is especially vital for anyone looking to enter an industry already flooded with a herd of competitively identical products backed by massive corporations. Although most products in the herd will discover they same failing fate, they will have the means to recover, and you, as a start-up, will not be able to keep up. You must be different if you want your product to survive.

I was walking through the mall before Christmas, looking to buy any remaining gifts when I came across a large rack of winter gloves in the middle of a department store. I saw a real-life example of Godin’s words, the rack was filled from top to bottom with what must have been over 60 different pairs of seemingly identical black gloves. I wasn’t in the market for gloves and nobody I was shopping for needed a pair, but had I been searching and had I stumbled upon this example of over-saturation, I wouldn’t have much to base my decision off of. These micro-moments of consumer decision, blown up over several occurrences over a long period of time, are what make or break a product. You must be the greatest or the least if your product is to have any chance at success. The cheapest, the fastest, the largest, the smallest, the easiest, etc. If one of these gloves had been made by a company not backed by millions or billions of dollars they would surely be destined for defeat in the Darwinistic concrete jungle of modern industry. Don’t be another black glove on the rack, be the brightest, the boldest, the cheapest, or the softest glove you can be.

Hindsight Bias and Getting Back Up on the Horse

As the businessmen and women who came to class to speak told us, entrepreneurship is all about learning from your mistakes and getting back up on the horse when you fall. Staying positive in the face of adversity and failure is key to be being successful. You have to spend a lot of time being bad at something to eventually become good at it, and the trades of business are no different. The $200 project was full of bad experiences and lessons to be learned for the next time, and as it came to a close this week I came to terms with what I needed to do better in the future.

Going into this week I was feeling an amount pressure and stress unlike that of any other project I have done in school. Several factors, including owing someone actually money and having to get people to give me money so that the project was to be successful, lead to this. We tried several times over the first three days of this final week to sell the water bottles, that no one seemed to want, to no avail. Our contacts on the sports teams wanted nothing to do with us and my idea for contacting the athletic administration was leading to dead ends. When a classmate and I tried to sell outside a basketball game on Wednesday afternoon, one of the trainers who works with Alex laughed in my face as he told me there was no reason they would buy our inferior and more expensive bottles. With the deadline looming and an authority figure actually laughing in my face, I went home from the sales attempt in a mildly sized pit of despair.

Our last hope was Thursdays E-block, a ninety-minute stretch that three of our members had free. These students reserved a table and posted up outside of the cafeteria over the course of both lunches to make our final stand. The evidence from all of the other attempts in the weeks prior would lead one to believe that this would end like all the others, in failure. I was preoccupied ushering the MLK assembly and attending class, but around half way through the block I recieved a text that made me jump out of my seat. Apparently, by docking the price to $5, we were able to break even in under 40 minutes. I guess a good price is just too good for Brookline kids to pass up on, no matter the quality or need for a product.  

Although this saving grace pulled us from the flames at the last moment, it would not be wise to bank on such a thing happening again in the future. Out execution of this project was messy from the moment it began up until its end. I learned about the dire and otherwise obvious need for market research before making an investment. We ultimately bought a product that very few people actually needed or wanted at its full price. If we had put more time and thought into understanding what people wanted and then designing a product from there, we would have had a much easier time. Secondly, my experiences as the team leader for this project have given me a better understanding of when to take the reigns and when to let your workers use their own intuition. Last week when we were wasting time making a useless flyer, I should have stepped in. But this Thursday when the team made an executive decision to lower the prices in the moment without telling me, it was definitely the best idea available. Intervening with the team’s entrepreneurial instincts in this moment would have lead to failure. Overall this project gave me plenty of headaches, but has also sharpened my acumen and made me pumped for the next opportunity to prove myself.

Follow the Flow Down

This week’s reading of Seth Godin’s Purple Cow lead to a discussion about how to reach your audience when your initial strategies fail. This one idea, in a sea of many, resonated with me, my group, and our current situation. Basically, we have a lot of product, we wasted a week of precious time to ultimately futile ends, and now only have a week left to sell enough product to pay back our investor and hopefully make a profit. Our flyers yielded little to no responses and when one of our members attempted to sell by means of a table we only sold one bottle. As team leader, I am getting desperate as I look for ideas and new strategies to kickstart a reinvigoration process as our deadline looms.

One method Godin mentions is to find someone in your industry who has a track record of successfully launching remarkable products and then them help you. Although we are merely a group of high school students, not yet players in a major industry, this idea still applies. We are selling a mainly athletic product, so we can consider the athletics sector of Brookline High School to be our “industry.” Now, finding someone who has their finger on the pulse of almost every athletic team in the school sounds difficult, but works out perfectly in this situation. Alex the Trainer is a contact for any and all athletes in need of his assistance, he has several fans inside and outside of the athletic community and has contacts in the BHS superfans. If we approached him with the new “standard BHS water bottle” we could sell it to him wholesale to distribute or we could use his contact list in the form of both popular student-athletes or teachers to get the word out.

Our team of sellers does not exactly consist of the most outgoing individuals, and selling these bottles to students has proved harder than we thought. If we can brand our bottles as the “standard” design for the school and then sell them to athletic administrators or coaches, people who students will follow and listen to, we could find success. We have been approaching this from the ground-level, which is most likely from the wrong angle, if we set up our supply at the top of the ladder, selling down will be much easier.

The End is Nigh, Time to Buck Up

This week kicked off our group’s selling period. The large shipment of bottles had arrived the day before winter vacation, leaving us no time to begin selling until school got back under way. Now that we had the order, the next step was getting the word out to the masses that we had a product they wanted, a task that turned out to be more difficult than we had predicted. As means of advertising we enlisted the skills of one of our group members, who has some remedial talent in graphic design, to create a flyer, in tandem with this we planned to spread the news of the products availability by word of mouth, both through a school-wide announcement as well as each team member being a spokesperson in their day-to-day schedule.

Our group feel short of operating at the great capacity it once did as we were a bit too lenient with the style of this class. Half of our team would go upstairs to work on the flyer every day, when all we needed was the one student who had the graphic design skills. Several class days were spent working on the flyer instead of using other means to spread the word. While I stayed behind in the class to handle any writing assignments or administrative stuff, we had more people than we needed working on a single task. This mistake ultimately falls on my shoulders, being the project manager I should have directed them to a better use of their time, but they told me they were putting themselves to good use so I allowed it. This would have been fine had the flyer done its job and attracted enough traffic to make up for all the days spent not selling, but alas, generating business is more difficult than we imagined.

While the flyer looked nice, it had one gaping flaw, students were instructed to fill out the flyers with contact information as a signal of interest, but we left no contact information of our own. With no way to relay their interest to us, the several students that we may have reached would immediately lose interest. Our product is not exciting or groundbreaking enough to cause such a wanting in a student that they would go out of their way to find the seller and make the purchase. So we spent a week of our precious time to ultimately put out a message that will fall on possibly eager ears with no way to respond, leaving us deaf to any interest there may be in the halls of BHS.

The time to sell our product is coming to a close and I am feeling a pressure unlike that I have felt from a school project before. With real money at stake, it is no longer just a bad grade that threatens if we fail. I divulged in this blog several weeks ago that I was happy and proud to be the leader of such a in-sync group, but, as I am slowly learning, you can not leave a group of smart and able-bodied students to a task without direction for very little will get done. In the coming week I will be tightening my grip on how we spend our time. This project is a true test to see if we have what it takes to pursue the world of business and I am not about to be defeated by wasted time and a few set backs. We’re going to sell these bottles if its the last thing we do.