Entrepreneurship: Polar Slog or Jungle Journey?

It’s popular these days to talk about the pros and cons of the four-year career trend, and my favorite recent quotation on how dramatically things are changing came from ZipCar founder, Robin Chase, at the FUEL Forum.  She noted that her father had one job in his lifetime, she’d probably have 6 jobs in hers, and her daughter works 6 jobs at the same time.  Optimistically, she reframed this as “revenue diversification,” but I’m still not convinced that we can really thrive, let alone survive, in this kind of environment.

In discussing this with one of the professional leadership coaches at THNK, I was reminded of a surprising chapter from The Lost City of Z – a retracing of the many expeditions led by Sir Percy Fawcett in South America to locate El Dorado, ending with his mysterious disappearance in 1925.  After several initial forays, from which he would frequently return the sole survivor, the Royal Geographical Society encouraged Fawcett to take on a seasoned explorer as a partner – James Murray, the polar scientist, who had carried out groundbreaking recordings on marine biology, physics, optics, and meteorology with Ernest Shackleton during an expedition to Antarctica.  No one would have predicted the misadventures that began when they set off from an outpost at the Bolivian-Peruvian border in September of 1911.

Fawcett (left) and Murray (right)

Author David Grann writes, “Voraciously curious, vainglorious, rebellious, eccentric, daring, autodidactic: Murray seemed like Fawcett’s doppelganger” - a bit like many an entrepreneur in the early 2000s.  But, as it turns out, “the qualifications for a great polar explorer and for an Amazon explorer are not necessarily the same.  Indeed, the two forms of exploration are, in many ways, the antithesis of each other.  A polar explorer has to endure temperatures of nearly a hundred degrees below zero, and the same terrors over and over: frostbite, crevices in the ice, and scurvy.  He looks out and sees snow and ice, snow and ice – and unrelenting bleakness.  The psychological horror is in knowing that this landscape will never change, and the challenge is to endure, like a prisoner in solitary confinement, sensory deprivation.  In contrast, an Amazon explorer, immersed in a cauldron of heat, has his senses constantly assaulted.  In place of ice there is rain, and everywhere an explorer steps some new danger lurks: a malarial mosquito, a spear, a snake, a spider, a piranha.  The mind has to deal with the terror of constant siege.”

Does this sound anything like the experience of running a business in our rapidly evolving marketplace, navigating the employment landscape, or even trying to stay on top of our technologies and their impact on our cities and communities, both online and off?  In this world, the seasoned business leader or innovator of days past may not be able to survive.  And, despite the adrenal fatigue brought on by the pressure to keep up with constant streams of data and news and tweets and texts, the entrepreneurs who flourish are those who have mastered the ability to adapt, retrench and remain flexible.  Indeed, it seems that professional resilience is no longer a luxury but a matter of basic survival.

I want to be careful not to dismiss the value of expertise and experience, but there does seem to be a precedent in the history of forging new paths that resonates with the growing trend in agile business.  I imagine that embodying an agile or lean lifestyle (explained in-depth here) – traveling light, knowing the minimum you need, testing things quickly, then adjusting or staying the course…rather than traveling with “baggage” (like infrastructure or perhaps hierarchy) – can be likened to the 1889 around-the-world race between Nellie Bly and her competitor, Elizabeth Bisland.  Who won?  The woman who knew that leaving behind creature comforts would win her freedom to respond in real time to the inevitable wrenches life throws in our paths.

Wendy McNaughton's illustration of what Nellie Bly brought in her single bag.

As a lifelong traveler and more recent entrepreneur, I find myself reflecting on the tensions in these lessons.  I remember preparing for a serious foray into the heart of the Venezuelan jungles to research Angel Falls, meticulously trying to pare down what I’d include in my pack and worrying that I wouldn’t be up for the trek.  And one of my childhood friends, now an experienced outdoor guide, admonished me, “the great thing about trekking is that anyone can walk, and we can all walk pretty far, it’s just a question of how comfortable you can become with discomfort (i.e. a heavy pack, shoes that don’t dry quickly, trusting that you can eat whatever is packed in).”  She also reminded me how much can be accomplished with duct tape. 

I wish you happy trails if you’re heading into the entrepreneurial jungle.  Travel light and be creative with whatever you decide to keep in your kit!

Empathy is the only literacy that matters...

I’m a passionate technologist who believes that tech alone will never solve our ills. And while the fashion is currently to claim that “[insert whiz-bang jargon] is the new literacy” (see “Code is the new literacy” from Alex Peake or “Creativity is the new literacy” from SXSW speaker Chase Jarvis), I would posit that good old-fashioned empathy is the only literacy that matters.  Without the ability to grasp the deeply human mechanics behind how and why we engage with the world and others in it, and understand context and constraints apart from those we know first-hand, not even the best innovator can cook up a solution to create positive impact – and with megacities on the rise, swelling middle-class populations demanding the same comforts other industrialized cultures have enjoyed, and limited resources being transformed into unruly stocks of waste, a true human-centered approach is required.

If you’re even a bit skeptical about this, consider the classic consulting lament that the worst thing you can do is spend your time coming up with a brilliant solution to the wrong problem.  How often do innovation efforts focus on developing skills around finding the crux of the matter rather than applying a well-packaged process to solving whatever the client may present? No matter how facile we are at devising solutions, if we don’t know how to FIND (or ask) the right questions and understand the relevant context, we won’t find a solution that sticks – or, I’d argue, is worth wasting time even pursuing. As is too often the case in cutting-edge technology innovation, we become fixated on the capabilities.  But just because we can, does not mean we should - as beautifully illustrated recently with the use of an Oculus Rift for chickens as a way to redefine free-range living.

It begs a short discussion of how we view “empathy” here at Curious Catalyst.  Merriam-Webster defines it as “the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another of either the past or present without having the feelings, thoughts, and experience fully communicated in an objectively explicit manner; also:  the capacity for this.”  We go a bit further and view it as a discipline that requires practice and can indeed be learned.  It’s almost a “Spidey sense” that harnesses intuition in the midst of critical observation – so that mere seeing is transmuted into knowing when something is ripe for disruption.  Often, the simplest innovations are the most profound precisely because they address a real pain point. 

An inspired practitioner of this kind of empathy is Wendy McNaughton, who is known as a “graphic journalist” in addition to a delightful illustrator.  In Meanwhile in San Francisco: the City in Its Own Words, she offers unbiased observation that leads to keen insight around individuals and their complex social patterns.  The book reminds me of a more whimsical version of Thoughtless Acts, the formative visual guide from IDEO’s Jane Fulton Suri – a master of turning empathy into innovation.

Curious Catalyst was founded in part as the result of asking how experience in emerging technologies could be put to better use for our collective good.  And, much as IDEO was the first consulting organization to make anthropologists and ethnographers a central part of cross-functional innovation teams, we need to bring this approach to bear in all of our urban planning and civic decision-making.  Our global village now contains too many different flavors of needs, cultures, and humans co-existing to devise solutions without this critical context.  And this brings us back into the increasingly important realm of systems dynamics and complexity science, which we discussed a bit previously here.

Years ago, I met Monica Rosenthal, a visionary behind the theater built at Inner City Arts in Los Angeles - and what I learned on that site visit has stuck with me.  This unique campus has developed programming that proves the value of different kinds of arts pursuits for some of our most at-risk populations.  According to The Arts and Education: New Opportunities for Research report (Washington, D.C.: Arts Education Partnership, 2004), dramatic arts are particularly effective in strengthening reading, writing, self-confidence, empathy, and tolerance.  Inner City Arts proffers, “in high-poverty communities, empathy can be transformative. If you can act your way into someone else’s skin during a theater production, you can imagine yourself in another world, another life—a life that includes achievement and belonging.”

So, the great news about developing empathy is that anyone can do it, and it’s never too late to start.  It just requires focus and a bit of practice.  What are you waiting for?

Rapid Prototyping through Partnership

In the realm of innovation, prototyping is as essential to the process as oxygen. And whether an organization or individual ascribes to the rapid approaches found in agile and lean disciplines or works to build creative confidence in the footsteps of IDEO’s legendary methodology, launching and scaling a breakthrough business requires proving the basis of the user needs being met or the new value being delivered before significant investment is made.  Placing small bets in the technology sector is relatively easy, where start-ups can keep overhead low and power a team with electricity, connectivity and coffee.  But what’s a brick-and-mortar blue chip corporation to do?

Partner with TaskRabbit.  Well, only if it makes sense.  And for Walgreens, it was a brilliant move. In the thick of cold and flu season, they announced a campaign with the popular, if somewhat fringe, service that mashes up the sharing economy with the economic downturn, letting people with time do things for people without time. In this case, a portion of TaskRabbit’s mobile app was dedicated to ordering cold and flu remedies from Walgreens. Users could select the nearest store, enter the products needed and indicate a preferred delivery time. Then, using the standard functionality, one could simply select the TaskRabbit you’d like to work with, and relief would be on its way.

At Curious Catalyst, we’re fond of what we call “rapid prototyping through partnership,” which essentially means that a large company can test an idea without building additional capacity outside a core competency by aligning interests.  And that’s exactly what Walgreens did.  Whether this is a labeled a pilot, a promotion, a partnership or a campaign, the goal is clear.  Combine the scale and resources of an entrenched player with a narrow but well-executed offering from a budding start-up to see if there is value in creating new capacity or potentially acquiring capabilities.

As TaskRabbit was founded on the premise of neighbors helping neighbors, aligning with Walgreens during flu season couldn’t be more on-brand. It also gave them a huge boost in exposure to a different audience. Meanwhile, if Walgreens had been considering the benefits of adding delivery to their offering, this collaboration gave them insights into uptake, operational considerations and allowed them to dip a toe in the water without significant commitment of resources. It remains to be seen how this may impact their business moving forward, but we’re keeping an eye on it.

Another example can be found in Uber, the rapidly growing car service company, who have done a bang-up job prototyping through partnership with their special promotions for ice cream and now trips to Las Vegas. One might say these are marketing stunts, but it’s clear that Uber’s product team is learning about what works for their customer base (or potential customers) without spending capital on the infrastructure required to deliver ice cream on-demand, instead using local business as partners in 33 cities.

The lesson for slower-moving Fortune 1000 companies should be obvious. Partnerships are much more than strategic in today’s rapidly changing marketplace – and there's no excuse not to leverage niche-focused start-ups to prototype new services or add revenue streams and validate demand before investing resources.  So, what are you waiting for?