What is the most fatal sin of entrepreneurs? There is an innocent temptation that often leads to financial downfall. What is the one question you need to ask before launching a product ? How you think, your mind-set, determines your ability to solve a business problem.
“Most entrepreneurs fail because they try to make a product for everyone." writes Ryan Moran. In trying to create a product or service for everyone, they end up attracting no one.
Dante’s Inferno, created 800 years ago by Dante, an Italian poet, writer, and philosopher focused on cardinal sins, traditionally categorised as pride, envy, wrath, sloth, avarice, gluttony, and lust.
At the beginning of the entrepreneurial journey, it helps to ask a rather odd question. Mastering paradox, being able to hold two contradictory opposing thoughts in one’s mind at the same time – is the most valuable skill a manager can master.
Somehow, one has to let go of pride, to let go of the powerful driving force of ego that says: “I know I am right, you are wrong.”
In the real life colourful palate of business decision making, black and white rarely appear. Instead, there are 20 shades of grey, not to mention the brilliant hues of yellow and orange, signalling the need to pay attention.
Stephen Bartlett’s 2023 book “The Diary of a CEO” is based on his 33 laws of business success, targeted more at a Gen-Z audience, often draws from insights of behavioural science and economics.
In rehashing the approach of the ancient Stoics, he calls his law 25 “the power of negative manifestation” based on an ability to see red flags and future risks.
“I am convinced that the most crucial, revealing question that unsuccessful start-up founders ought to have asked themselves and their colleagues before pursuing their ventures was “Why will this idea fail?”.
Both doctors and ailing patients can attest to the notion that prevention is better than cure, and in business there’s no chance of prevention without the humble confrontation with the prospect of failure before starting out” writes the Bartlett, creator of the popular DCEO podcast.
It’s a balancing act. How does one know whether to be determined to pursue an entrepreneurial dream at all costs, not listening to the critics ? Or, whether it’s prudent to be circumspect and ask “Why is this a bad idea?”.
Sheer volume of information about business advice is growing at an astronomical rate. [Yet why don’t we feel any wiser?] What can’t you find the answer to on our alternate reality -- the internet?
For instance, on just one channel, YouTube more than 500 hours of videos are uploaded every minute, amounting to roughly 300,000 hours [12.5 days] of new content per hour.
As the historian Yuval Noah Hariri points out, from the Stone Age to the time of AI, it is a mistake to equate information with truth.
So, when it comes to that entrepreneurial bright product idea, what is truth? Unveiling the truth means going back to basics, including design thinking.
What is the customer’s problem one is trying to solve? What is the customer’s need or want, that gnawing upset, that is not being addressed at the moment by the products on the market?
Design thinking is that iterative, back and forth, non-linear process based on a collaboration, a working together, a co-creation of the product designers and the real life customer.
Innovative solutions only come to life when you understand how the purchaser thinks, feels and behaves.
It all begins with a feeling, an emotion leading to action – which may seem irrational.
No need to have egomaniac ideas about market domination. Start with just one product for one test customer. Don’t commit the cardinal sin of thinking you know what the customer wants. Ask them, watch them like hawk, understand their feelings.
All of a sudden an unexpected problem from hell stops you dead in your tracks -- and this one seems impossible to solve.
Major hurdles are disheartening, but they are often unavoidable. But the way you engage with and think about problems, directly influences your ability to solve them.
“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them” advised Albert Einstein.
David J. Abbott is a director at aCatalyst Consulting. [email protected]
