The square one position

I've read many definitions of an entrepreneur. Almost always they are written by people who haven't been entrepreneurs and are trying to describe them in such a way as to fit into conventional business paradigms. It is a little like blind men trying to describe the color purple.

The trouble is that the activity of entrepreneurs is usually only considered after the entrepreneur has got well past square one. To truly be able to define an entrepreneur the description must include the activity at the square on position: when the entrepreneur has no funds, no ideas and quite often no contacts. Not all entrepreneurs start from this position although many find themselves there several times. My own entry into the world of the entrepreneur started from this position. It happened when I resigned from my first and only place of employment.

The last six months at college saw us all writing out and sending CVs to every technology oriented company we could think of. I sent out forty-six. In those days they were all hand written so this was quite a considerable number.

As chance would have it, I didn't get my first job through these CVs, it came as a result of my uncle, a London Taxi cab driver, chatting to one of his fares. It was an American businessman who'd just arrived in England to set up a subsidiary for his US company: The Gisholt Machine Tool Company based in Madison, Wisconsin. My uncle told him about me just finishing college, and the American gave my uncle his card and told him to send me along to see him. Within a month, I was hired at a rather generous salary and sent to the USA for six months special training.

For the first two years, the job worked out fine. I was flying all over Europe, visiting most of the large manufacturing companies. My work was extremely varied, part customer service, part sales and part design. The team consisted of only five people: the CEO plus a another director who was the son of the company's founding president, another American engineer, a pretty little secretary and myself. For me it was both exciting and interesting; that is, until they started to expand. First came the chief engineer, then the chief salesman, then the accountant. This was swiftly followed by rules and regulations, procedures and methods, costing and planning.

I decided to move on, but, I had a problem. They had been paying me a salary that was at least equal to any salary I could command anywhere else - plus, I was enjoying a very generous expense account that was almost as much as my salary. A new job would entail a reduction in income.

In working out the consequences of this change in income I made a discovery that was to change the whole course of my life. I worked out how much I'd be likely to earn as a reasonably successful engineer over the course of a working life span. This is quite easy to do in career occupations as salary scales are fairly well established: sufficient at least to get a first order approximation.

From the aggregate amount of my total anticipated earnings over a forty year period, I started to deduct the cost of a reasonably comfortable life style. Buying and maintaining a house, eating, clothing, bringing up children, transportation, holidays, entertainment, insurances and pension arrangements and all the other expenditures which are more or less mandatory for a reasonably secure and comfortable life.

Before I'd reached the end of the list of things I'd noted down as being essential, I'd run out of money. Paring the costs somewhat drastically, I managed to get the expected life expenditures roughly equal to the anticipated earnings. Looking at the pared down list and realising that it left nothing over for any discretionary spending I came to the startling conclusion that a career as an engineer was going to commit me to a life of bearable mediocrity.

With all of my future income committed to maintaining this modest life style there seemed no possibility that anything particularly exciting was going to happen in my life. It was this revelation that prompted me to change direction and learn how to become an entrepreneur.

As ludicrous as this may seem in retrospect, it seemed a plausible proposition at the time. Surely, I thought, being an entrepreneur isn't about luck, it isn't about having the right birthright, having high connections or access to vast amounts of money? It had to be something that could be learned. It seemed eminently reasonable to me that, if it was something that could be learned, I had at least as much chance as anyone else to become an entrepreneur. After all, hadn't I been trained to be the proverbial rocket scientist? Full of confidence, I gave notice to quit my job and one bitterly cold day in February I found myself out on the street looking for a place to start becoming an entrepreneur.

Unless anyone has actually been in this position it is difficult to imagine. There is a whole world full of opportunities but no place to start. I was taken back to the time I'd played around with my first 'free' electronic components; the confusion of not being able to apply any theory or organisation to the problem. It was a similar experience, a total inability to see how to make sense of the world.

To this day I don't quite know how I got started. I talked to lots of people, I went to many places. I met a man in the street who was selling personalised pencils. Through this I got into gold blocking door bell labels. I met an old school chum and through his father who had a used car business we bought a few cars and sold them off at a profit.

Random events took me in different directions. A news bulletin announced that there was a change in the law to allow gaming clubs to be legalised. I started a gaming club. This led me to owning a discotheque. Tenant protests over noise and an ebullient local police force closed my discotheque and I started the first computer dating agency in the UK. I bought and sold some land. I ran a skiing holiday club that took weekend parties up to Scotland from London; I started a bizarre adventure holiday scheme that took people to an island in the Mediterranean. These were the winners, there were hordes of other little business adventures which were contemplated, tried out and aborted.

Most of these businesses were with partners, all as irresponsible and carefree as myself. We had a simple philosophy: that opportunities turn up of their own accord and anyone can become an expert at anything within a month. This last proposition we got from an article in Reader's Digest.

Becoming an expert in a month, seems to be an outrageously naïve attitude to have. In fact, it made sense at the time and makes even more sense to me now in the context of the Internet. Actually, the idea didn't just come from the Reader's Digest article, it had come to me years before, when I was at school. All through my student life I've been unable to learn anything in a classroom setting. After a few sentences of any lecture, my thoughts would drift away, after which I never seemed to be able to keep up. This kept me near the bottom of the class for the first year or two: until the time I was unmercifully picked on by a chemistry master.

To avoid the usual harassment I would get from this master after a poor exam result I decided at one end of term exam to cheat. I went carefully over the year's course and made a note of all the important points and wrote them down in tiny handwriting on a piece of paper that I could conceal in my sleeve. To my astonishment, when it came to the exam I found I didn't need to look at the crib sheet. I'd remembered everything. Through the process of isolating the important facts and writing them down I'd acquired an understanding that made everything easy to remember. To my surprise, and even more to the surprise of the chemistry master, I came top of that examination.

I then used this same technique throughout the rest of my school and college days. I'd not bother to learn anything all through the year and then make a precise of the lessons in the month before the examinations. It produced good results and many school prizes. The trick I'd discovered by accident was to isolate all the principle concepts; understand those and dispense with all the detail. This gets to become a habit and book reading then becomes a game of "spot the concepts".

This technique proves especially valuable when used in a "need to know" situation - such as the kind of experience I'd had at the Radar Research Establishment where in a matter of a few weeks I'd been able to design pulse shapes and wide bandwidth amplifiers, maybe slower, but almost as competently as any professional electronic engineer.

Lack of knowledge seemed to be absolutely no bar to taking on any entrepreneurial venture. My excursion into the gaming world was a case in point. The club I ran was set up to play the casino game of chemin-de-fer. As I had virtually no money when the club first opened, I couldn't afford to play in the games myself and didn't actually get round to learning the rules and how to play chemin-de-fer before I was making enough money to join in. That was two or three weeks after the club had been running.

The key to understanding and appreciating the "become an expert in a month" philosophy is to realise that a short intensive study of any subject can give you a rough guide to the principle considerations. Although you will not have anywhere near the expertise of the real experts you'll probably know more than at least ninety-nine percent of the rest of the population who haven't had the time or the inclination to look at the subject at all.

The value of this "become an expert in a month" approach is not that you could do the things that the real experts can, but, that you get to know enough to be able to ask the experts sensible questions when you want to do something in their areas of expertise. It enables you also to know enough about their expertise to be able to hire them to do the expert jobs for you.

There are many versions of the anecdote where parents are being shown around a school to which they are thinking of sending their child. The head master takes them into the science class and explains that these pupils will be those who go on to become scientists, surgeons, doctors and engineers. The parents are then taken to the fine arts class where the teacher explains that these pupils will go on to become musicians, bankers, lawyers, artists, writers, journalists and designers.

When they get to a third classroom, the parents ask what these pupils are studying. The teacher explains these are the children who are not clever enough for the science class and not gifted enough for fine arts and are getting just a general all round education without too much depth. "So what will these pupils be doing when they leave school?", the parents ask. "They'll be employing the boys in the science and fine arts classes", the head teacher replies.

There is more than an element of truth in this trite anecdote. Specialisation, by definition, confines a person to a niche. The real game is always played by the people who have the ability to organise and find employment for the niche specialists.

A reader of the draft in the virtual cafe wrote in response to this "expert in a month" idea:

If you precise something, by definition you loose some of the information the original contains. What you end up with is not an expert opinion, just an opinion...informed, perhaps...but VERY prone to error... The very thing you lose in approaching a problem this way is the subtleties that the expert is supposed to know about... This can (and often will) lead one to holding what one considers to be a strong position, based on a false reading of the details of a subject...

Elias

Another reader also commented:

I don't think anyone needs to believe "all this Internet stuff" is so readily accessible that anyone can become any kind of "expert" in it in a short amount of time, however marginally,. We already have far too many corporate droolbags out there who believe they are experts in a given endeavor because they read an article about it in "Marketing Today" or some such.

Warren Ockrassa

Both seem to be right, but then, if you accept their viewpoints as being valid, you are left with the realisation that it is impossible to learn everything there is to know about the environment of the Internet to the standard of a real expert. This leaves only the alternative of becoming an expert in a small niche area. Yet, someone has to be able to employ and direct the specialist. The specialist, by definition, does not handle the more practical realities of getting a business up and running.

This provides another paradox: to be an expert in e-business and e-commerce you have to accept the fact that you'll not be an expert in all aspects of e-business and e-commerce. This makes it imperative for an e-business or e-commerce strategies to include the involvement of many different people who are niche specialists. Again, it points to the conclusion that e-business and e-commerce strategies are not about knowing the technology but knowing people.

An important distinction must be made here between two quite different uses of the "expert in a month" technique. One use is potentially harmful, maybe even pathologically fatal to an organisation. This is where the technique is used by someone to pretend they know more than they do, or even worse, allow this technique to make them think they know more than they know.

Most times, a superficial knowledge is easily recognised by the real experts, but, sometimes an expert might not be bothered to argue a point or may simply allow a non expert to get themselves into trouble to teach them a lesson. Even more dangerous is when a person with superficial knowledge speaks for the real experts, perhaps to a higher authority, or makes decisions without consulting the real experts. Used as a ploy to get an order, a contract or promotion of some kind, pretending to have expert knowledge can lead to disastrous results in the Information Age.

This gives us another paradox: the really knowledgeable proponents of e-business and e-commerce readily admit their lack of knowledge. Fortunately, as we shall be seeing later in the book, there is a strategy that will recognise, isolate and eliminate the effects of the misuse of the "expert in a month" technique.

The proper use of this technique requires humility. It has to be recognised that the superficial knowledge gained in a month is for communication purposes only. It is not to be thought of as giving sufficient knowledge to do the job of an expert, but, simply a means of finding out what you don't know. It allows strategist to be able to recognise their own deficiencies so that they can bring in the appropriate expertise.

The best managers and strategists are those who have the confidence to go around telling everyone that they don't know anything. Smart people don't pretend to know. Those who go around pretending to know everything in the Information Age will always get into trouble. Those who use a strategy that takes into consideration their *lack* of knowledge will fare much better. This is why "expert in a month" can work, but, it doesn't work if it is used to pretend to know more than you do know.

This "become an expert in a month" concept has many forms and variations. The simplest is when you need some special information about a product or service of which you have absolutely no knowledge. At first you don't even know what questions to ask. You don't know what are the important criteria and the variables. You make a first phone call where you make a complete fool of yourself asking all kinds of dumb questions. A second phone call sees you asking more pertinent questions. After half a dozen phones calls to various people you are speaking and asking questions like an expert.

A similar experience happens at trade shows. You may start off by not even knowing what the trade show is about but by the time you've gone around all the booths and spoken to a lot of people you come out a relative expert. Or, at least, that is what you would appear to be to most people.

Speciality magazines and trade journals are other good sources to acquire a quick expertise. Reading a few months of issues, gets you acquainted with current topics, developments and problems. More importantly it familiarises you with the special terminology that is used in a niche area: the conceptual phrases and buzz words used in the communication of that world's thoughts and ideas.

Now we have the Internet, which makes the "become an expert in a month" a highly practical concept. You can use search engines to track down some of the tangible stuff, but, everything you need to know to become a relative expert you can obtain by spending a few weeks interacting with people in a special interest group (SIG) Internet discussion forum. There are thousands of these covering every possible subject you can think of.

In these groups you can very quickly pick up on the main issues, learn all the special terms and how to speak to the experts. Again, you will not become as expert as the experts but you'll glean enough knowledge to be able to communicate effectively and efficiently with them in their speciality areas of knowledge.

At another table in the virtual cafe, Mrs Brisby wrote in response to a paragraph I'd written in the first draft :

The question then becomes one of making a transition between the old and the new.

How do you have to think about the Internet in order to escape from the established thinking and business practices of the industrial age?

How do you get up to speed in the rapidly changing environment of the twenty first century so as to avoid being left behind, fretful, baffled and confused?

Mrs. Brisby responded:

Simple. Tell them that the internet is run by a bunch of middle management, and so long as they keep feeding money into their IT department, they'll get rich?

HAH! If only it were that simple. I'm reminded of a rather amusing anecdote where some fat-cat execs hear that NT is the new best thing.

Of course, the IT department had enjoyed running Unix boxes in the back room for some many years, and left their "other" staff be occupied with their Wintel boxes.

The goal was to link the two. The fat-cats invest some money into some outside work to bring in NT. These MCSE completed' folk talk local to the fat-cats (mainly because they were already rich; hence they can afford the MCSE exams) and NT boxes are brought in.

Now, the techs don't know how to run NT. Even IF the NT boxes had the easiest OS in the world, it certainly doesn't make any sense to these guys.

Why?

After all, they've been running UNIX for years!!! They know it can do anything they'd ever want to do! But now there's NT. So when NT crashes, and the tech guys figure out that NT is unstable (duh) they plead to the middle management.

Word goes around, and eventually the tech team is fired for incompetence. After all, how could NT be unstable if its the new best thing?

Now the new tech guys come in (UNIX gurus, again) know a little about Novell and OS/2 and lie about knowing about NT (mostly what they've picked up from trade magazines). They hook up the SUN boxes with NFS mounts, turn the NT boxes into FreeBSD machines, run SAMBA and NFS loopbacked, and presto- the Wintel teams are connected.

Now what, pray tell, is the moral of this story?

Simple.

You can know anything and everything about how to hook up a UNIX network. Maintain, etc. But unless you keep building your knowledge _base_ -- and keep up with the "best new thing" you will get lost, and you will need to turn your NT boxes into FreeBSD machines.

Mrs. Brisby's post illustrates several important points about this fast changing world of information technology. Reading beyond the technicalities it contains, the post tells of a management that is hopelessly lost in the technical world of computers. A management that lives in a world of buzz words and "next best thing" mentality. It tells of an IT department that is managed by people who are so deeply involved with their own specialist world that they are losing connection to everything else that is happening around them. It tells of opportunists who are in the right place at the right time and apply "expert in a month" technology to a company's problems and are rewarded by taking over the positions of the specialists who became too narrowly focussed.

More significantly, it shows how a cavalier attitude towards technology can allow a powerful and expensive computer system to be rigged up to provide a minimal service that performs only to the limited requirements of a management that have no conception of its full potential.

Certainly management can't be expected to have expert knowledge, but, they can become "experts in a month" and learn sufficient to know the right experts to talk to, and how to talk expertly to them. In this way, before making decisions and taking action, they can find out what kind of options are open to them and the criteria that is relevant and important.

Probably most readers skipped through Mrs. Brisby's post without bothering to make much sense of it. It contains technical words they don't understand, incomprehensible strings of letters representing arcane hardware and software solutions: the buzzwords of a technocratic elite. But, these are the cynical observations of a real expert at the cutting edge of this new technology. Somebody, like Dai Williams, who can see the "suits" being ripped off, bamboozled by the cowboys and the charlatans. Mrs. Busby and Dai Williams are talking sense, but, how many managers would be bothered to make the effort to be able to step into their world and listen to them.

Unfortunately, many managers and executives much prefer a cosy chat over an expense account meal, or, in a privileged place in a hospitality suite - where all the technicalities are swept under the table. This to them is the executive life, and they will scorn the self effacing indignities of having to learn the ropes in an Internet special interest group forum where they will have to make fools of themselves by having to ask basic questions. If manages and their companies are going to survive into the Information Age, this attitude has to change.

Once again, the search for an optimum strategy to deal with the complex environment of the Internet, e-business and e-commerce is bringing our attention to the fact that the answers lie in our ability to communicate with people - not in the arcane details of the technology.