This method is aimed at a bootstrapped or small operation producing a less complex product with a lighter design cycle (consumer-facing web in partic-ular). I prefer the ready-fire-aim method of management for most of my projects that fit in this category. As the name suggests, you will decide what target you are trying to build into using the best guess available at the time you start. You immediately start building something, and vigorously collect feed-back along the way to create a suitable product. The comparison to artillery is
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informative: old-school battleships would come equipped with big guns on their decks. To hit a target, they would turn the turret toward the target, set the elevation, and select how many barrels of powder to put behind the pro-jectile. As far as aiming goes, they would be done at this point. The gun would be fired and would either hit the target or miss. This can be problematic if the target is moving in unpredictable ways. The first shot will often be nothing more than a targeting aid, to be followed by a second or third shot that will be required to home in on the target. This wastes time and gunpowder, but it was the best that the Navy could do at the time.
More recently, guided munitions solve this dilemma. A projectile is fired in the general direction of the target. Feedback (usually a laser, GPS, or RADAR) al-lows constant adjustment of the path in flight. Even if the target moves, so long as the feedback loop is intact, you will arrive at the intended destination.
Projects can be like this.
I like to build something small and quick, gain feedback, and repeat. This cycle continues until I have a product that works. I will almost never have a com-plete spec before getting started. Firing first and aiming later gets you to mar-ket fast, which is critical for small businesses—especially if your first guidance was close to the mark. This speedy approach also helps you to validate the market early. You can get out there and start learning, and get engaged in the market quickly and adjust (and even get out) quickly if need be.
Ready-fire-aim is particularly appropriate for consumer-facing web businesses, as there are lots of potential users and relatively low costs associated with de-velopment. The capacity to play this quick strategy decreases as the number of potential customers decreases. If you are aiming to sell software to enterprise clients (IBM, GE, etc.), then you had better have a very well-targeted product and a clear story of how it works and why it is valuable to the customer before you deploy or package your offering. Packaged and physical products and con-sumer goods are the same way—do your market validation and research be-fore you build!
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Tensions
Tension is the resulting pressure when two or more forces are applied to a system in opposition to one another. Business is, in many ways, the manage-ment of tensions. There are examples of this everywhere around us. In government, an example would be the classic American dilemma of small government vs. big government. In raising our children, we have the conundrum of helping a child to succeed vs. allowing them to use their own strength and learn from failure.
When addressing these problems, we should recognize that there is no right answer, but rather a balance of trade-offs. There may be one or more optimal answers that are as close to right as we could hope to get. These optimal an-swers are elusive. In a complex system (such as a business), the optimal choices for any particular subset of phenomena change with circumstances and depend highly on what your situation is, what your viewpoint is, and in what place and time you are at. I call this type of adjustable subset a tension system.
An example of this elusive optimization can be illustrated by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s response to the Great Depression. In the long narrative of small vs. large government, he famously opened the government’s bank ac-count and began to direct public funds toward make-work building projects across the country. In retrospect, this is appalling to the small government camp, but it arguably did provide an answer to the dire economic malaise that was threatening the stability of our nation. Moving forward in time, as the economy stabilized and private sector jobs were created, it became less and less appropriate for that kind of spending and government intervention to con-tinue. Taking the context of the 1980s or 1990s, the same set of actions would clearly have been inappropriate. In the 2009 market collapse, a similar spending pattern was seen again with President Barack Obama.
When addressing tension systems, the right answer can never be ensured. In-stead of focusing on right or wrong, we position ourselves on the continuum of options, watch what happens, take feedback into account, and then either update or maintain our choices.
It is helpful to visualize tension systems as a continuum or line running through an imaginary space. You could visualize a temperature scale this way, with cold
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temperatures on the left, warm temperatures near the middle, and boiling hot temperatures on the far right. You can see that for a bath, the right choice would be warm, and for a margarita you would need to move left into the near-freezing region of the line.
This chapter will discuss some of the most common tension systems that en-trepreneurs need to manage. The intended result is that you will:
• Recognize them: Many decision-makers are not explicitly aware of these tensions, and often simply ignore them or lock themselves into a position. Having an awareness of these systems will inform your capacity to recognize when data or situations are worthy of your notice. The ability to properly categorize data as you receive it is important when trying to improve your decision-making.
• Plan for them: Planning will also give you the opportunity to explicitly consider how each of these tension systems ap-plies to your business, and to formulate a set of under-standings about how to address them individually and in relation to each other.
• Optimize them: Your success in whatever you do will be, in part, the result of how you manage tension systems. Once you have recognized the trade-offs repre-sented by the continuum present in each of them, you will have the tools to begin explicitly calibrating your performance and manipulating your position in each. This active experimentation is the cornerstone to maximizing performance.
Notice that I have used the word explicitly several times. This is not a throw-away modifier to make the sentences seem more official or businesslike. I am using it to point out the contrast to non-explicit behavior (e.g., what happens by default, what we have seen other people do, what we have always done, etc.). By looking for, noticing, and then specifically responding to stimuli, we take a measure of control that would otherwise fall to chance.