Rich Mintz  

This engaging postmortem account by Mark Hendrickson of what went wrong at Plancast got me thinking about our experience at BusyTonight, a late, great search engine technology startup where I was a principal. It was a great career experience for me, but we did a lot of things wrong, spent a lot of money that will never be returned (mostly lent by friends and family), and closed after about two years with no sales and no prospects.

User experience consultant Whitney Hess, who brought the story to my attention, called it a case study of what happens when you don’t do your user research, and that’s probably right. We didn’t either — we went into the development of BusyTonight with plenty of technical knowledge, an understanding of the problem we wanted to solve, a solid approach, and talented staff. The thing we didn’t have (aside from “enough money,” of course, and a host of other things that would have benefited us) was any evidence that anyone would want to buy the thing we were selling. Or, to put it another way, nobody cared enough about the problem we were trying to solve to get excited about our solution. And we didn’t give enough credence to inferior but better-funded and better-marketed alternatives, which eventually ate our lunch.

I landed on my feet, as did my two partners. But it would have been nicer if instead we had made our fortunes, no?

I found Ariel Levy’s profile of Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, Indian biotech CEO, refreshing on multiple levels.

In her free time, around the edges of running a gigantic biotech company, Mazumdar-Shaw devotes her surplus entrepreneurial energy to changing the Indian health delivery system, and the approach to health prevention and health insurance, at the level of the Indian village.

For one thing, it’s always interesting to hear about an energetic, thoughtful, successful businessperson, who’s not afraid to think capitalistically but who applies her surplus entrepreneurial creativity to social challenges. I never heard of Mazumdar-Shaw, the billionaire founder of Biocon, and in fact I’m not sure I’ve ever taken notice of Biocon, which gives you a sense of just how insular we Americans are, even the thinking stratum of us.

For another, I enjoy reading a story about a strong professional woman who was underappreciated in her early career — indeed, who worked in a country where women are systematically underappreciated — who maintained her good humor and indefatigability, and kept pushing forward in the direction indicated by her own personal compass, and ended up being successful. Her Scottish husband John Shaw is a successful businessman in his own right, but it’s clear from this story that in their household her career is privileged over his, and he’s comfortable with that.

It’s a classic entrepreneurial story (nobody believed in me, but I believed, and kept going until I succeeded), but not all entrepreneurs do keep their good humor. Some end up embittered and paranoid, resentful of those who didn’t believe in them, unable to share credit or mentor others, and unwilling to credit the large share of luck that played a role in their successes.

Mazumdar-Shaw doesn’t seem that way, at least in this telling. She hasn’t lost her good nature or her optimism, doesn’t seem to have an outsized opinion of her own talents, and is clearly generous both financially and emotionally to her professional staff, who speak highly of her. What’s more, she’s held onto her sense of social vision, which is what separates a great entrepreneur from a good one. She wants nothing less than to transform the healthcare experience of the Indian villager.

Historically entrepreneurialism has been seen as a men’s game, but I’m glad that’s changing. Human society needs all the social creativity it can muster, and that’s doubly true in places like India where a quarter of the population lives in stark deprivation. Just imagine a world where everyone was encouraged to contribute according to his or her full talents and interests, to reach his or her full flowering, in an environment that fully respected differences of approach and inclination — how much richer would life be!

I’ve often been surprised at the degree of honest self-awareness I see in the voices of the interview subjects at Adam Bryant’s “Corner Office” in the Sunday NYT. Almost every week, there’s at least one nugget of quotability that helps me see something more clearly in my own life path. And so, this week, this nugget from Sheila Lirio Marcelo, founder and CEO of Care.com:

“The first thing [the executive coach] gave me advice on, and I give it to everybody, is to journal. Write things down. When you come out of a meeting, or you come out of an interview, or you just finished running a session, what’s on your mind? How did it make you feel? How did you make people feel? What’s going on? Again, it was raising my self-awareness around my management style.”

Amen! During every American business boom cycle (and I’m old enough that I can say “every,” thank you very much), there are always entrepreneurs who are lionized in the press for just charging forward, trying not to stop to think, just indulging their animal business instincts or riding the wave or making the wave or what have you. This (let’s call him the “Nose for Success” Guy, or “Nose Guy” for short, and 95% of the time it is a guy) is just one of the American business types that we all recognize and are taught to admire. (One of these guys shows up as a character in Allegra Goodman’s new book The Cookbook Collector, which I just finished.)

The problem with this is that “be more like Nose Guy” is a difficult business strategy to put into practice, if by “strategy” you mean “principles or approach which, if you adopt it, will lead you to your goals.” The Nose Guy story is tautological. If you have the nose for success (and, really, we can argue about whether such a thing even exists, but grant for the moment that it does), and you find yourself in a lucky position, then, boy, will you do well. But if you don’t have it, saying “be more like that guy” — like the tedious urgings of George Costanza’s parents about Lloyd Braun (video), and indeed of anxious parents throughout history to emulate boring, conformist siblings and cousins — gives you nothing actionable to work with. To be more like, say, Warren Buffett or Mike Bloomberg — for you, [Your Name Here], to make your actual successes more resemble those of these people, what exactly are you supposed to do today?

Well, one of the very few levers you have, as an ordinary person with an ordinary nose, is self-awareness. If you’re lucky enough to be Nose Guy, you can just charge forward after the scent — you don’t have to be able to explain how you know which way to go, just go. But if you’re like the rest of us, you need to be more deliberate. And in the realm of normally successful business people, most of us get there — if we ever do — by being exceptionally deliberate. And (again, in the absence of The Nose) the way to successful deliberateness is awareness of the world, and of yourself, and how the two interact — knowing which of your instincts to trust, and which to second-guess, being able to predict how you will affect people, being able to motivate them to work with you rather than against you, and so forth. And this awareness, in turn, can be developed only by study of oneself and the world and the points at which they interact. And this study, in turn, is vastly aided by a self-reflective attitude.

It goes without saying that nowadays we all move too fast. But writing — especially coherent, thoughtful, synthetic writing — cannot be rushed. Writing up one’s impressions of a meeting or encounter — or, really, anything — is a superb opportunity to take stock of what went well, what didn’t, how you feel about it, and what to do next. Taking time to think and write about a failure is the right way to learn from it and turn the next opportunity into a success. And, more broadly, stopping periodically to take stock, to collect your thoughts, and to set them down is the best way to make sure that your life path, taken broadly, is leading to a place you will be happy to find yourself in a year’s or five years’ or ten years’ time.

This blog, rambling and random as it sometimes may seem to you, has been immensely useful to me in understanding who I am, what I’m good at, and what direction I should point myself in, in both the short and long terms. And, within the context of my job, the things I take time to reflect on are the things I handle best, and the areas in which I produce the best value for our clients, for my employer, and for myself. Marcelo’s advice rings true.