11 May 2019

Entrepreneurship is about relentless execution: like grinding a hot poker into a pin

By George ILIEV
CorporateNature Metaphor Series, No 98

"Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself" - George Bernard Shaw said. This highlights the imporant distinction between thinking and doing. 

Many people believe the key to success in entrepreneurship is coming up with a great idea: a sesame seed that you find after sifting through tonnes of hay. The sesame seed (or a poppy seed) is also at the centre of PhD dissertations, as doctoral students are discouraged by their supervisors from taking on too big a topic. 

A tiny novel idea may be deemed enough in academia. Yet, the metaphor about the sesame seed is far from sufficient in entrepreneurship. The success of a startup is not that dependent on the sesame seed. A more useful metaphor for running a startup is grinding down a hot poker into a pin. In simple terms, execution trumps ideation.

Startup guru Guy Kawasaki demonstrates the importance of execution for a startup with the following scale:

  • An idea is worth 1 point;
  • A business plan is worth 10 points;
  • A developed product is worth 100 points;
  • And the first customer is worth 1,000 points
Relentless execution is the key for hammering the hot poker into a pin. The heat makes the poker tricky to handle but also makes it malleable: strike while the iron is hot. The only thing worse than a hot poker is a cold poker, as grinding a cold poker into a pin would be way more difficult. 

How would you know if your startup is a hot or a cold poker in its base? Hot pokers change their shape after each strike of the hammer - a process known as iteration. Cold pokers don't iterate and as a result they end up as cold pokers, just as they started... whereas many of the hot pokers will eventually turn into pins.

Pin (Source: Wikipedia)







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