johnmaconline

“We got 3 months.”

Although the 3-month lens dooms many companies — or if not dooms, then at least shackles them in a cycle of short-sightedness and missed opportunities — it can also be exactly the catalyst that you need.

Time is a sneaky variable. You can feel like you have enough, and then you get complacent or take your eye off the ball.

Ninety days puts a box around it. A frame, outside of which you don’t care. Now you can focus and eliminate all other distractions.

“If we spend this money, will we get a return in 3 months?”
“If we choose this path, will it help us finish in 3 months?”
“If we pick blue instead of green, will we grow in 3 months?”

Burn the ships. Damn the torpedos. You got 3 months.

When I was a teenager, I had a plastic camera that took 110 film cartridges. I snapped random shots on our vacations or during the typical teenage events at the time.

I always bought Kodak film cartridges. I didn’t know there were any other brands.

You also knew Kodak and you also bought their film. They were ubiquitous. At its height in the mid-90s, Kodak had revenues of around $16 billion. Almost $11 billion came from selling and processing film.

Did you know Kodak invented the first digital camera? They also were the technology leaders in the space in the 80s and 90s.

But then they tanked their digital technology. On purpose.

Smart people decided that it would be dumb to cannibalize the core of the company. Why push digital photography when we make all of our money on film? What would the street think?

Makes sense. Hard to argue and easy to make the case.

Especially if you view your business through the 3-month lens of the public trading floor.

There’s no unexpected plot twist coming. You know how it ends for Kodak. They still exist, but its been a rough ride. They’ve been through bankruptcy and in 2023, brought in around $1 billion (and trending down). They’ve turned into primarily a commercial printing and chemical company.

The trouble with the 3-month lens is that it demands output and success right away. Make the decision that maximizes the next 3 months.

The future be damned.

We’ve created a roadmap for our product and business.

It’s the culmination of many discussions, arguments, and efforts. We like it. We think and feel good about it. 

Do we put the blinders on, buckle down, and don’t pick our heads up till we’ve realized the implementation?
Or do we start down that path but keep our heads up and ears open and re-evaluate our priorities and roadmap at each step?

Having a direction, goal, and purpose is important because distraction and constant re-evaluation can derail you just as quickly as going in the wrong direction. However, flexibility and openness are the only ways to ensure you don’t start in the wrong direction. 

Failure is a tractor beam. It’s hard to break free once you’re in its clutches. 

Your job, as the leader, is to determine how to stay out of the tractor beam, recognize when you’re caught in it, and fight like hell to break it’s grasp.

Don’t wag the team around. Keep them focused and heads down. You keep your head up and ears open. If you need to, don’t be afraid to get them moving in a different direction. 

Authority is everywhere, but which do you recognize?

Do you recognize the authority of the laws of your town, state, and country? What about the international laws? Humanitarian laws?

Do you recognize the authority of experts and thought leaders in institutions, industry, and systems? Professors, doctors, physicists, engineers, pastors, your neighbor who runs the book club?

Do you recognize the authority of others in your family? Elders, spouses, or that Uncle that plans the family reunions?

Do you recognize the authority of the chain of command? Bosses, Generals, coaches, and the captain of your team?

Do you recognize the authority of ancient or special texts? The Constitution, the Bible, the Qur’an?

I sometimes wonder if all of our profile bios should indicate the authorities we recognize.

I’ve spent a good deal of time and effort over my career learning how to make myself, my teams, and the teams around me more productive.

In fact, my current venture is fundamentally about helping small software teams be more productive. My team and I have been working on and building our product for almost 10 years. We’re pretty darn good at it.

I’ve talked a lot about productivity in this space — time prioritization, working from home, leadership, procrastination, AI, etc. While I stand behind all of it, in some ways, these are strategies and tools that nip around the edges. They’re accelerators and ways to be more efficient. Not quite as insignificant as cleaning up the mouse poop in a room full of elephant dung, but there is an assumption that the person, leader, or team has a fundamental quality.

Purpose.

Purpose is an engine. Purpose is grease. Purpose can’t be stopped.

Everybody is productive when they have purpose.

In the early 00s, I worked on developing Bluetooth. My company, Agere Systems, was an early licensee of the technology, and we were building a chip and firmware to sell to computer and consumer electronics companies. I suspect you had never heard of something called Bluetooth at this time.

We had some typical marketing, project, and engineering difficulties and missteps, but we were getting there. However, the market wasn’t materializing, and it wasn’t clear that it would, so the executive team made the decision to cancel the project. Zero revenue earned.

My guess is that not only do you know what Bluetooth is, but you have double-digit devices in your home that have it. Almost 6 billion Bluetooth-enabled devices will be shipped in 2024.

Bluetooth was a huge missed opportunity for Agere. All they needed to do was hang on till the market happened.

For the last almost eight years, I’ve been working in fintech. The company I worked at till recently, IDEX Biometrics, makes fingerprint sensors for credit cards.

The idea was good. Our tech is good. Our engineering team is good. Our ability to produce and deliver these sensors is good. However, my guess is that you don’t have a credit/debit card with a fingerprint sensor.

The market hasn’t developed.

Is this the same as Bluetooth? Does IDEX just need to hang on?

I don’t think so. I’d be willing to bet that you never will have a credit/debit card with a fingerprint sensor.

What’s the difference between Bluetooth and biometric sensors in credit cards?

Bluetooth is a painkiller. It filled a market and consumer need. Once it started rolling out, its usefulness and desirabitlity skyrocketed. Fingerprint sensors in credit cards are a vitamin. Only one side (the bank side) sort of wants it because it might help in one particular area (authentication). It doesn’t fill a need.

Knowing when to hang on or quit in all aspects of your life is a magical skill. One way to figure it out is to apply the painkiller or a vitamin analogy.

When I got out of college in the early 90s, I started working on satellites at GE Aerospace. Not long after starting, a colleague introduced me to the sign-off table.

The sign-off table was a physical desk in an office. Usually a drafting table to accommodate both the size and volume of the papers that accumulated. A stack of paperwork that included drawings, schematics, analyses, and memos piled up over the course of about a week. In some ways, it was the most important location within our entire facility because the sign-off table was the gate to GE getting paid.

Each set of papers required the physical signature of the responsible person. An actual person. A human with a name and a location within the building, scrawled their signature on the physical papers to indicate, “I agree this is complete, accurate, and fulfills the intention. I stand behind it.” The signature represented the person.

No money came in until that set of signatures was delivered.

The sign-off table generated tons of drama.

“You can’t sign off on that yet!”
“There is no way I’m putting my signature on that like it is!”
“Why hasn’t she signed off on this yet?”
“Can you believe he signed off on that?”

If it was you who had to sign off, your signature mattered. You thought about it. It meant something to both you and the team. Because your signature represented you, the person. And you mattered.

What does our signature represent today in the world of e-signatures, PIN numbers, and click-this-checkbox-to-sign? I even have a bitmap image of my signature stored in my computer that I can simply copy and paste into a document.

Was it really me that signed it? Am I putting my stamp of approval on it? Am I standing behind it? Does it matter?

Although I sure do love the convenience of these new forms of signature, I think we’ve lost a little bit of the human.