Plan for Success requires a different mindset than planning for problems

 

     Failure often seems to help itself be planned for -- because it is an ongoing, inevitable process of life. People get sick. Equipment breaks. Contracts are not obtained. Someone drives a car through the front store window. And so forth.

     But, even though we (all) want to achieve success, we rarely explicitly plan for it.

     When a business is starting out, it is a good thing to be "mean and lean". This means that people are putting lots of effort into it with as few people as possible. Many do multiple jobs. When I, and my business partner, started our business, I was Vice President of Engineering, head of client support and training, head of sales support, coordinating head of project development and product management, and I was also in charge of cleaning the restroom when it was necessary. We all worked 60 to 70 hours a week -- because we all had a dream of being able to build something that we could profit from and which would provide a useful societal service.

     At Bell Labs, we had a department head who was a very strong technical person and also had a lot of extra energy. He had been quickly promoted from Member of Technical Staff to manager. While at managerial level, his team did great -- because he did all of the work assigned to his team. He had no managerial, or delegating, skills and he chose to not develop them. He did what he did best -- produce products. Not quite as quickly, he was promoted from manager to department head. And there he stuck. He no longer could do all the work (it was amazing he could do the work of seven people -- 40 people was just too much). He slowly developed some managerial skills -- enough to keep his department from falling apart (and he had some good managers reporting to him) but he had reached the top for him.

     Mean and lean -- until you can't do that anymore. People can work 60 hour work weeks for a while -- but not forever. Putting more wicks on the candle just means the wax will be used up more quickly. Juggling tasks can be done when there's only a bit to be done on each -- past that and things will be dropped.

     The "best" time to plan for growth, and success, is when you aren't in the process of running as fast as you can. If you have to do several different roles, clearly identify them, decide on processes that can be used when you are dealing with much larger amounts. Be prepared to split and expand. Tools that are overkill at the beginning can be indispensable as you grow. When we started our company, we were strong on marketing and sales and technical development. We were weak on management and finances. Management skills we succeeded in developing as we went along -- though I am certain that having good, strong, managers would have greatly helped us to build the company. Finances -- that is what eventually doomed us. We made believe that we knew what we needed to do and when we needed to do it. We didn't.

     The first part of growth, and success, in business is structure and function. The second part is product. We had a great portfolio of products. Well respected in the field. An architecture that expanded and met our needs for more than fifteen years. A general base that we could continue to expand in kind -- until we couldn't. At some point, the market gets saturated or technological directions change. "The shark must keep moving or it dies."

     What did we need to do to succeed in this area? Networking would have been number one. It is vital to know what is actually being deployed, what is being marketed, in the field. You can read about maybes in technical and business magazines but the conferences and market displays is what companies are actually investing in and betting on. Second would be partnerships. They aren't vital -- but they disperse the risk in going after the "next great thing". With partners, perhaps you can have four irons in the fire rather than one or two. It is similar to venture capital. Lose on a couple, break even on a few, and hit a home run on one. It is partially a matter of numbers.

     Finally, luck is still part of the business. Luck, as defined as things happening about which we have no known control. Bet on three possible new product lines. All three can fail. Design a new widget that everyone has been demanding. A major company -- with which you don't have the least chance to compete -- brings out a parallel product three months after your launch. Things happen.

     But you can minimize the risk.

Failure: How does it help to lead to success?

 

     There are a lot of memes about failure. I normally give them a like, occasionally an insightful. Most people would agree that failure is only a stumbling block towards the future. Yet, I have a well-worn NASA t-shirt reading "Failure is Not an Option". What gives? Isn't that contradictory?

     Failure is not an option. This doesn't mean that failure cannot happen. When you are putting together a list of scenarios, there are paths -- things that occur -- which deviate from success. What do you do when you reach a scenario of "failure", or non-success? You start initiating methods of surviving or restarting or recovering or overcoming the problem(s). In data tree terminology, failure is never an "end node". In non-computerese -- failure just means you try something different, you don't allow it to stop you.

     So, failure is not an end goal. How can "non-success" be of benefit? In any plan, or design, there are likely to be multiple places where things might not go as desired. People leave. Prototypes don't work. Money gets low or runs out. A hurricane hits the building. You have such a huge surge in customers it is not possible to keep up with deliveries -- damaging your reputation and allowing competition a window in which to gain ground. Many, many things can happen. No one can anticipate every possibility -- and too much preparation for unlikely possibilities can be counter-productive by using resources better used elsewhere.

     You are moving along on your plan. Something happens to cause you to have to try to find a solution quickly. You don't find the solution quickly enough -- you "fail". The next time you start proceeding on a plan, prior experience (which, hopefully, you have thought long and hard about) will help you to avoid, or ameliorate, the possibility of the same problem occurring. That doesn't mean that no other problem will occur but as you iterate you can become more adept at addressing problems quickly and have more experience that can be used -- either directly or indirectly.

     Someone who has the same problems occurring time and time again is not learning from it -- and should probably find a different line of work (this can also apply to social or personal situations). Someone who has not succeeded multiple times may, or may not, be someone on the edge of making it their goal-line the next time. Their precise situations should be carefully examined before committing yourself to their plan.

     A local university thinks that it is terrible, and will reject students, if it has taken them more than twice to pass a course. Totally illogical and absurd. First, there are many reasons why a student might not pass a course -- pandemic, illness, inept professors, overcommitments, etc. There are probably more reasons not directly in the student's control why they might not pass than reasons in their control (not smart enough, not dedicated enough, ...). I have interviewed, and hired, a lot of people throughout my career. I wouldn't penalize someone for passing a course the first time but I would be more impressed with someone who persevered until they succeeded. Not only have they reached the desired objective but they showed the dedication needed to overcome obstacles. The same logic can apply to anyone, or any situation.

     And that pretty much summarizes the use of failures. Failures allow a person to learn. If a person takes a test but is not told in what areas they did not do well in, they have lost the potential to learn and improve. That is true whether or not they achieved a "passing" score. Failures allow them to learn. Some failures are self-evident. Others have to be described and explained but lack of knowledge of them can be fatal to growth and improvement.

Murphy's Law: Or why in the world did that have to go wrong?

 

     There is a "law" of the universe (similar to Newton's laws or the Department of Motor Vehicle's laws) that is known as "Murphy's Law" (or Murphy's first law; Murphy was so infamous that it was decided to tack on two additional "laws" to his name). All apologies to anyone named Murphy out there. (Actually, the roots of the adage are uncertain but Murphy gets primary credit in US society.)

     So, why end off the blogs for this year with one concerning "anything that can go wrong, will go wrong"? Some of you may have noticed a period of inactivity for me since mid-November 2021 (most probably didn't notice at all -- oh well). (Do, please, feel free to leave comments or suggestions for future topics.)

     Why end up the year with this topic? Well, I certainly HOPE everyone had a fantastic year. For those who didn't ...........

     Around November 20, the hard disk on my primary computer went bad (SMART tests started failing). Actually, that was only the start of analysis. It took a week to find out why it was failing, another week to decide how to approach the problem (repair or replacement -- I decided on replacement). "Supply chain issues", "chip shortages", etc. etc. It took a while to get the new computer. So, now to just use my backup drive to restore the system onto the new machine! Piece of cake, right?

     Nope. That backup hard disk, which was behaving fine (and happily responding to diagnostic programs) prior to the hard disk collapse, now decided to not mount. Checks were performed. New tools were obtained. File system in great shape. Partition/volume test results erratic -- sometimes they passed, sometimes not. It mounted once -- on a different machine which I was using to perform tests on the hard disk. But I had a technician on the phone and they felt it would be useful to try one more test -- lost that one instance of mounting.

     Then, early this week, I performed an OS upgrade on my new machine. While updating, it took a left turn and had an unexpected crash/reboot. When it came up, the disk was mounted. No known reason -- any more than any reason known why it STOPPED mounting.

     I started the process of restoration. It took a LOONG time. USB-C transfer times as slow as 3 KB/sec at times. But it kept moving (and the data transfer rate fluctuated from 3 KB/sec to as much as 1.3 MB/sec) and, after about 28 hours, my system was restored to almost the same state as it was in on November 20.

     Lessons learned? No, not really. I had done regular backups. How many of you are making backups of your backups? What is the chance of a primary hard disk and the primary backup disk failing at virtually the same time? Before it happened, that chance was awfully small. As always, however, once it had already occurred, that chance was up to 100%. If you are in that small minority who can keep track of such (I am not sure I am) then alternating disks for backups might be wise.

     Could I have continued work using alternative tools (tablet/smartphone/borrowed computers)? Sure, but there are a lot of things in the environment that just were no longer there. It turned out that one of the things about which I was saying "thank goodness" really wasn't true. It turned out that that cloud backup of some vital files actually had different copies of some files that were accessed differently for different user accounts. Any work that I did in the meantime had the danger of being overwritten if/when the restore did succeed. I had just barely decide to "go full speed ahead" when the backup disk decided to mount.

     Other things that fall into Murphy's category. The lower heating element of our oven broke (literally) while cooking Christmas breakfast. In our bathroom, the outlet stopped working, the main circuit breaker had NOT flipped, and the apparently affected switch did not have a GFI reset button -- finally tracked down the outlet that DID have a tripped GFI, with reset button, this week. (Are you aware that a GFI interruption affects ALL of the outlets on the circuit -- not just the specific outlet? You probably are -- I wasn't.)

     In logistics, resource planning, and business procedures there is always an attempt to allow for things going wrong. But just what specifically goes wrong makes a big difference and it is safe to assume that, if you have prepared for 98% of the likely problems, you will eventually get one in that 2% not taken care of. This is why recovery plans are important to have in place -- your prevention methods will not always succeed. This is a given in the world of cybersecurity. "Bad guys" are always going to be searching for newly exploitable vulnerabilities and they will find them. Noticing, stopping, and recovery from will always be needed. (But keep trying to protect, or eliminate, the vulnerabilities anyway.)