One of my favorite classes from college was Business Management for Engineers. I worked with my engineering cohort to solve business problems.
We analyzed Harvard Business School case studies to understand pricing and accounting. We worked together as if we were in a strategic role. Pretend you were the CEO Michael Dell. Would you pick lithium-ion batteries over nickel-cadmium batteries? The tradeoff is risk of explosions vs a bulky laptop.
Every week we collected facts from a case like Dell’s dilemma and debate our decisions.
The class started at 8:00 AM sharp. The professor, Fred Gibbons enforced timeliness and every lecture started on time. His insights around startups, technology, and businesses helped shaped my management style. He’s one of my favorite professors from college.
Fred Gibbons was the founder and CEO of Software Publishing Corporation. He started the company when he observed software sold as floppy drives in plastic bags. His idea was to publish software like books.
I asked him how he dealt with the challenges of running a company over a decade. His response and I’m paraphrasing him was, “Everyone’s dealt a hand. It’s how you play the cards.”
Short yet insightful phrase.
I haven’t talked to him in years to check if I’m interpreting his intent so here’s my version –
Accept reality. Then play the best game you’ve ever played.
Let’s go into the details. If I had everything my way, I’d prefer a royal flush every time. Give me an all-star team, a surge in customer acquisitions and the media promoting the company. I would also like revenue multiplying like cryptocurrencies in 2017.
That’s a stacked hand. If I’m in that situation, I’m going to press that opportunity and compound the advantage. During a time when a company is on an upswing, you may feel you can do no wrong.
What’s also important is learning how to play from disadvantaged positions. If you have a down moment, how would you handle the situation?
A crappy hand could look like a burned out team, a broken system, or churning customers. Even worse having 4 hours before the company could die to ship a project for an acquisition.
The only constant in a fiery situation is myself. What do I have at my disposal?
If your team isn’t the ideal combination, you have at least two options. Should you improve your hiring funnel or train your team? I wouldn’t rail 100% one way or the other.
I bet on the team instead of hoping a magical ace of spades will show up in time like Gandalf arriving at Helm’s Deep. You can never assume you’ll start with a dream team. Your job as a manager is to guide the team into an elite force so spend time and train each engineer. You need to turn everyone into an ace.
If the system is buggy with nobody is around to repair, I’ll jump in. I’ll map out the methods and stitch together an architectural diagram. I can’t fix a system if I don’t know what it’s supposed to be doing.
If customer acquisition is wonky, we’ll need to examine the metrics. We should talk to every customer to ask why they’re churning. Another reason is the sales pipeline isn’t as robust as we thought. We could have lost product-market fit.
If the company will die in 4 hours, we’ll use every minute we’ve got. 240 of them. Yes I’ll complain or I’ll vent along the way. But I’m going to do something about the situation.
If we don’t do anything, game over. If we do something, there’s a chance we will survive.
With only a few hours to go – I used every last second to finish the job. I worked with the team to parallelize tasks. Engineers who owned entire systems deployed their software. As each system launched, the engineers worked together to ensure cross-dependencies were working. The filtering engine could receive packets and stream the results to Elasticsearch. Non-engineers helped QA and checked our software had search functionality.
We pulled that off by squeezing every last second to complete our mission.
I never saw this event coming and I can’t predict all the random events that can happen. Accept variance. I embrace whatever situation I’m thrown into and work with the team to maneuver our way out.
I assure you the more hands you play, the more you’ll recognize patterns. All I can do is control my reactions to the events. I start saying, “You know, I’ve seen far worse. But if this got even worse, here’s what we could do to fix the issue.”
If playing that hand doesn’t work out, I hope you learn how to play a different outcome the next time and that’s called…
Experience.
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