
The Scarcest Resource at Startups is Management Bandwidth - DanielRibeiro
http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2012/04/28/the-scarcest-resource-at-startups-is-management-bandwidth/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+BothSidesOfTheTable+%28Both+Sides+of+the+Table%29
======
donw
Focus is the most important thing you can have as a startup founder.

Every failed company that I have founded, worked at, worked with, or heard of,
has ultimately failed because they could not focus on a single goal, and
instead pursued multiple, divergent plans... all at the same time.

Not 'some failed companies', or even 'many failed companies'.

Every company that I have seen fail, has failed because they could not focus.

It's amazing how easy it is to be distracted, as well. Lots of shiny new
opportunities to expand. There's new features that will give you a share of
some marginally-related market, or new alliances that will only cost 'a little
engineering time'.

It's amazing how expensive those 'little' things really end up being.

~~~
SoftwareMaven
Yes, but too single-minded of a focus can lead to opportunity blindness. Daily
pivots are bad. Never pivoting is bad. Building a successful startup is highly
nuanced.

~~~
rwallace
Doesn't pivot usually mean "our original plan X doesn't work, let's ditch it
and do Y _instead_"? That's a different thing from what the article is talking
about, "our plan is still X, but let's do Y _at the same time_, it won't cost
that much".

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officemonkey
The book "Good to Great" sums this up amazingly well as something called "the
Hedgehog Concept."

    
    
      * What are you deeply passionate about?  
      * What can you be the best in the world at?  
      * What drives your economic engine?
    

If there is something that does not fit in those three circles, do not do that
thing.

Much of the entrepreneur blogosphere would go up in a puff of smoke if people
would simply read the business books that stand the test of time.

~~~
ryanmolden
[http://www.freakonomics.com/2008/07/28/from-good-to-great-
to...](http://www.freakonomics.com/2008/07/28/from-good-to-great-to-below-
average/)

~~~
_pius
That article is little more than FUD and neither refutes the Hedgehog concept
nor adds much value to the current discussion.

~~~
ryanmolden
So to be clear, a man writes a book purporting to identify the characteristics
and behaviors that make companies great. He calls out some number of such
great companies and shows how they all fit into his analysis. Said companies
go on to do objectively less than great, and someone calling that out is
engaging in FUD? Interesting.

In my opinion Jim Collins has made a career on identifying success in
hindsight, plunging headlong into a classic case of survivorship bias in order
to divine the root causes of these successes, and then publishing his
analysis. Can you point me to anything he has written that is predictive
instead of simply retrospective? Can you actually claim that there aren't
likely to be hundreds of businesses that exhibit all the traits that make
businesses 'great' and yet failed?

~~~
_pius
_So to be clear, a man writes a book purporting to identify the
characteristics and behaviors that make companies great. He calls out some
number of such great companies and shows how they all fit into his analysis.
Said companies go on to do objectively less than great, and someone calling
that out is engaging in FUD? Interesting._

Nothing in the article actually shows that the Hedgehog concept is bad or
wasn't a factor in these companies' past success. It's little more than a
glib, cocktail party-sized nugget of contrarianism with no real substance.
That's why I dismissed it as FUD.

 _In my opinion Jim Collins has made a career on identifying success in
hindsight, plunging headlong into a classic case of survivorship bias in order
to divine the root causes of these successes, and then publishing his
analysis. Can you point me to anything he has written that is predictive
instead of simply retrospective?_

That's the whole point: it's not predictive, it's retrospective.

I said the article you linked to is FUD not because I'm a Jim Collins or
business book industry apologist, but because the article attacks a strawman,
namely that the book claimed that companies' past success implies that they
will always be successful. It'd be great if one could prove business success
by induction, but it doesn't work that way. This article doesn't even attempt
to address whether or not the failed companies it mentioned continued to use
the concept described in the book.

~~~
ryanmolden
>Nothing in the article actually shows that the Hedgehog concept is bad or
wasn't a factor in these companies' success. It's little more than a glib,
cocktail-party sized nugget of contrarianism with no real substance. That's
why I dismissed it as FUD.

And nothing in Jim Collin's book shows it _was_ a factor in their success, he
just claims it is because all the companies he analyzed allegedly fit into his
rubric. Does he research if failed companies did not fit into it equally well?
Or perhaps other competitors in the same industry? If all you are doing is
retrospectively identifying success, well great, but that isn't terribly hard
to do. If all you are doing is cherry picking examples or worse, simply
grouping already successful companies and then deciding that their success
_must_ be due to some common trait(s) they all share, then you also aren't
providing any real insight in my opinion.

As others have pointed out his theories are vague to the point of uselessness.
Do only what you can you be 'best in the world' at? Really? Best in the world?
Well by that metric there really only should be one company in every single
industry, since clearly we can't have multiple 'best in the worlds'.

All he is engaging in is book length common sense "Do what you are good at,
don't do what you aren't good at, don't waste money on ill-conceived ideas".
Trite sayings that are not really anything anyone would argue against but also
don't give a lot of amazing insight.

Maybe I am just too dense to get his brilliance, but I have never seen
anything amazing from his writing, which was why I originally responded to
someone that appeared to be implying that he was apparently the diviner of the
one true path to success.

~~~
_pius
_All he is engaging in is book length common sense "Do what you are good at,
don't do what you aren't good at, don't waste money on ill-conceived ideas".
Trite sayings that are not really anything anyone would argue against but also
don't give a lot of amazing insight._

This is a very common criticism of business books, self-help books, and, hell,
advice in general. And yet there are lots of companies and people who neglect
to heed these trite sayings and fail because of it. Most people would probably
be 10x better at life if they could internalize all of the "obvious" advice
they've ever heard.

 _Maybe I am just too dense to get his brilliance, but I have never seen
anything amazing from his writing, which was why I originally responded to
someone that appeared to be implying that he was apparently the diviner of the
one true path to success._

Fair enough. I viewed the person you responded to as claiming that (1) this
bit of Suster's and Collins' advice is useful and (2) this post, like many
other startup blog posts, recapitulates concepts covered in traditional
business books. The article you linked to does nothing to support or refute
either point, which is why I was dismissive of it.

------
SatvikBeri
I would frame the same idea in a different way: the scarcest currency is
thought.

Willpower is finite. There are a very small number of things you can spend
effective mental energy on-you can't work at optimal intelligence 12 hours a
day (or even 8 hours a day).

Furthermore, I've noticed this trend where spending twice the amount of
effective, focused work on X usually results in more than twice the benefits.
This means that you have to pick what even enters your attention very
carefully.

So ask yourself: what do I spend most of my time thinking about? And what
should I be spending my precious thought on?

------
ojbyrne
Rather than Jim Collins, I'd vote for Michael Porter as the management guru to
read. His idea of generic strategies is a great way to deal with this.
Essentially he says there are 3 generic strategies - cost leadership,
differentiation, and focus (market segmentation), and that you need to pick
one and follow it 100%. Doing that really can focus the company on what needs
to be done now and what is irrelevant to your success.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porter_generic_strategies>

------
devenson
Correlation does not imply causation.

A "startup" is a company in search of a successful business model. Those that
fail will leave behind a record of many failed explorations, making it look as
thought this was the "cause" of their failure. Perhaps they just failed to
find their successful business model. Perhaps it was never there. That said, I
do agree with the author. Focus is key.

~~~
wpietri
There's an important difference, though.

At my startup we've tried a lot of things, but we try them serially. We went
through a bunch of ideas early on, doing our best to kill the idea in
prototype. Here my co-founder talks about how we spent 6 weeks to kill an idea
that other people spent 9 months (and millions of dollars) to kill:

<http://vimeo.com/24749599>

The failure mode that Suster talks about is trying to do all the ideas in
parallel. I agree that startups should try a lot of things, but strongly
believe they should focus on one at a time.

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jrkelly
100% right on focus, but this part is grating:

"But as you know, a few key people in any business have disproportionate
impact on the company’s ultimate success. And nobody is more important in this
regard than senior management."

You see recommendations for this management style throughout Mark's blog
posts. IMO, he is advocating a style that is more centralized than is
effective in the uncertain environment of a startup. Strong central control
works great when you are executing on a clear business model. Prior to that,
you want empowered employees who have a shared view of the current business
model hypothesis and are confident enough to question it.

~~~
xanados
Keep in mind that his advice is targeted at companies at the stage in which he
is most active, those seeking or having completed Series A/B venture capital
financings. By the time a company has reached this stage it has much more
centralized control than a pure pre-seed or angel startup.

------
jmitcheson
Out of all the CEOs I've been around, the one I viewed as the most successful
would always tell me "If you try to do too many things at once, you end up
doing justice to none of them at all".

------
elviejo
Dr. Goldratt wrote in his later works that the "biggest constraint is
Management Attention".

So it is crucial when you are constrained by cash, time, people, etc. to keep
your focus.

------
fellars
Any suggestions on how to maintain focus, while still allowing team members
flexibility on what they work on? It seems to be a very fine line I have
struggled with in the past.

------
paulsutter
Superb article, I would up vote this 5 times if I could

------
robatsu
The thing that I dislike the most about the technology business is people who
want to use developers as crash test dummies for their random ideas and think
that "good ideas" are the topmost measure of goodness and once having a good
idea, all the rest will naturally unfold.

Pivots are good and oftentimes necessary, but I learned years ago that good
ideas are a dime a dozen. The ability of an organization to competently
execute on a (seemingly) good idea is the much rarer skill, 1% inspiration/99%
perspiration and all that.

The OP seems to think this is something that can be managed. I do believe
that, but I'm not sure it is something that can be as easily quantified & then
learned as a generic management skill as the OP seems to imply.

