Oversimplified IT

One of the most difficult things to discuss with my partners is the obsession with process and details. As a former techie and a developer, I understand, you want to bring the same sense of analytics, control and testing to your business development. You want to anticipate problems, solutions to those problems, document and prepare for even the most remote of unlikely scenarios…

And inevitably you will fail.

Business is not about that. Business development sure as hell isn’t.

Business moves fast. This is why spending enormous amounts of time discussing and anticipating issues is counterproductive in business – you are in front of a potential client to solve a problem, not introduce them to every other problem down the road that they may encounter. Would you like to know why? Because they see the existing, current, real problem as an issue that is a bottleneck in their business.

Business outcomes can be unpredictable. Marketing for example. What you put in is not always going to be what comes out. We’ve spent a better part of the year on our 2016 marketing plan where we do events for our partners – we could have thrown it together in a quarter but we didn’t want to wing that commitment – and in the end it might be a flop, which is why we don’t only do one thing.

Business is all about service. Do not overthink it – the only reason someone is paying you in IT (don’t kid yourself, your skills aren’t universal you’re not a doctor or a lawyer or anyone with a shred of regulatory approval/control) is because you are willing to do something they don’t want to do themselves.

I’m not encouraging people to be reckless.

I am encouraging you to move faster. If business is fast, with unpredictable outcomes and is all about how you can serve your client – spend less time imagining problems and more time asking people what else you could do for them. Ditto for those of you working for someone else as an employee – nobody ever got fired for wanting to do more work. #initiative

And if you doubt me here is some dream crushing as a CEO of a software business: It’s still going to be shit. If you were good at anticipating problems you’d work in QA not in business – stuff is going to crash, cloud is going to go down, Internet will get slow and random things will fail. It’s a race – get more faster. It’s Friday, get to it.