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Personal Qualities

I can point to three vital qualities that, for me at least, contributed to my success: comfort with uncertainty, demanding standards, and force of will.

One of the key tasks of an entrepreneur is to anticipate trends in technology and the marketplace with sufficient accuracy and over a long enough period of time so that he can build an island of stability — a vision. With stable ground under foot, management by objective becomes an effective tool. Consider the opposite situation, without stable ground. If objectives change on a regular basis because of a lack of foresight about technology and the market, then the workplace becomes inefficient. Work accomplished today risks being thrown out tomorrow. At some point, if change is too frequent, the organization accomplishes no lasting work at all and the company fails. Effective leaders want people working on what will make sense, not what did make sense.

Creating a vision requires comfort with uncertainty. Indeed, one can also think of a vision as a means for the entrepreneur to internalize and remove uncertainty from an otherwise scary, unfiltered view of the outside world, enabling his employees to feel more at ease and permitting the company objectives to remain steady. Successful entrepreneurs are probably more comfortable with uncertainty than anyone else in their organization.

Personally, change and its inherent uncertainty attracts me because I enjoy building analytical, predictive models — descriptions of how things work that enable me to forecast conditions in the future. Business situations are normally so complex that the resulting predictions and forecasts are highly approximate; nonetheless, I believe that my models help me get the odds in my favor. The models represent how I construct a vision and the better my model, the higher my confidence of success.

Another important personal characteristic is my high performance standards. My parents raised me to always do my best, and the lesson stuck. I want the best employees, an elegant product, fast growth, high profits — only the best satisfies me.

Of course, high standards are both a blessing and a curse. When a company achieves high standards it becomes more competitive in the marketplace, and that is a blessing. On the other hand, a company can expend so much energy trying to meet a high standard that something more important suffers. Indeed, many good things come at the expense of other good things and a leader must trade one off against the other. For example, growth can be faster if a company lowers profits to spend more on marketing and promotion.

Time and again I saw the validity of the 80/20 rule that says that 80 percent of the results come from 20 percent of the work. Surely this fact is key to making an effective trade-off between two good things. Unfortunately, the rule itself is not actionable because it does not indicate which 20 percent of the work gives 80 percent of the results. Rather, making a trade-off is a matter of judgment and experience. I scoured every decision looking for what would give the most bang for the buck. I also accepted a personal bias of insisting on excellence in the areas I enjoyed the most and where I had the most experience, such as product design. I think such a bias is fine in moderation; indeed, it often becomes the basis for a company's unique personality.

Gradually, I learned that I spent my own time most efficiently when I worked on things that made everyone else more effective: the company and product vision, market and product definition, product architecture, the product development life cycle, acquisition and allocation of resources, and improved methods of communication. It was better for me to hone the product development life cycle, so that every product design decision made by others was a little better than it otherwise would have been, than to involve myself in each design decision, trying to make it perfect. Entrepreneurs must look to leverage their precious time.

Another area where I demanded high standards was in the pace of our development efforts. Experience has taught me that in a fast-changing marketplace, competitors can come out of nowhere — in my case, a new competitor emerged on my first day in business. Just as importantly, market insights and a leadership vision are fleeting. Consequently, I always scheduled projects as aggressively as possible, trying to insure that we obsoleted our existing products before someone else did it for us. Reflecting this emphasis, we spent an average of 16 percent of revenues on research and development during my years at Banner Blue.

Probably no other demand on my employees raised as much controversy as the constant push to develop new products as quickly as possible. Can I justify my impatience? Absolutely. For example, if I had not pushed for a three month development schedule on our first CD-ROM product, Family Tree Maker Deluxe, it is likely that Microsoft would have purchased Automated Archives before we even considered it. In that case, the history of Banner Blue would have been much less significant and I would not be where I am now.

If that was the only time it made a difference, then in my mind all of the other times were worth it. Usually a fire alarm is only a drill, but occasionally the fire is real. You only know for sure after the fact, so it is important to pay attention to each one. As Banner Blue sometimes raced against an unseen and perhaps non-existent competitor, I occasionally became the enemy in the eyes of some employees who did not see the purpose of our haste. Lynn Brewer picked up on this phenomena and gave me the good advice of always looking for an external enemy upon which to focus the company.

Nonetheless, people did not always follow a management directive just because I communicated that it was my desire for them to do so. Even when employees participate in the objective-setting process and financial incentives encourage them to perform, there is no guarantee that they will follow through. Every objective in the world I created as an entrepreneur conflicted with an objective in an employee's world at one time or another. Many times we encountered unplanned circumstances, requiring extraordinary effort to compensate, which is inevitable in a world with complex products and many players.

What closed the gap between employee desire and company necessity was well-informed force of will. I say well informed, because it was force of will not for the sake of same, but because it was necessary. When I believe that I must do something, there is no force that can divert me from the task. When the situation involves others, I am comfortable imposing my will on theirs. I consider it my responsibility. To meet an important objective, I was able to encourage, assist, direct, reward, replace, reassign, fire, and even step in for the employee not doing his job.

My employees accepted this because of the well-informed part of the equation. I did my best to insure that the objectives were realistic, necessary, and effectively communicated to the people involved. If the goals had been unattainable or unnecessary, people would not have taken them seriously — nor should they have. Taking it one step further, my judgment about these issues had to be correct most of the time, or people would have lost confidence in me as a leader.

Fortunately, when the entire organization sees the leader take objectives seriously, most employees do the same. Effective application of will power thereby reduces the need for it in the first place. The appreciative response of the company's most successful workers also encouraged me. When I stepped in to make something happen, they knew I was simply helping them meet their own objectives.

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