Styles & Approaches : & Beyond Mere Entrepreneurial-Minded People

= Two Examples of Company Culture:

(1) A while back I worked inside to build one of the greats of startups--we flipped a switch to go from a few cities to 200 overnight.

This meant we had to have tools--notice I didn't say, necessarily, "systems"--at our disposal that could be rapidly "played with" to figure them out, reliable in behavior, documented, and that we could stand-up, tear-down, or link-together as we pleased. 

Overnight we had to develop our own infrastructure: 

an ever-updating documentary repository with information on the issues, policies, controversies, advice related to, and problems across the thousands of jurisdictions; 

a ticketing system for handling customers issues (at least two very different classes of customer at first, and these rapidly diversified); 

and on and on and on and...

KEY was people we examined for possessing normally contradictory traits ("S-Curve" personalities), both creative and able to execute (at least, on what they were interested in--we hired like minds in this regard who could variously specialize or focus on problems as they arose and just handle them), 

AND LETTING THEM (after all, they were closely examined before hiring--basically, non-sauve people who would normally get rejected at any "normal" and "respectable" company...GIMME) 

simply go off and handle them (there was no technically-illiterate manager exclaiming "why is he obsessing over that stupid script when we have thousands of emails in the queue", which if there was would often get an answer like "this script will address everyone in that queue with a tailored message, so it won't look cookie-cutter." 

People were key to this--but interestingly, so was the nature of the technologies we chose. If we had chose wrong, we'd be locked-in to what businesses typically are: a mire of unreliable, insecurable, inflexible, highly complex, systems that invite Russian h4ck325 to ransomware your systems! 

(A problem I'm sure you've noticed keeps happening, over and over.) 

These systems meant anyone with an idea could try (in a sandbox to start, of course, so they didn't deploy some change that broke a globally operating system), iterate/refine, and implement solutions. It was the physical manifestation of 709-explained philosophy of the Borg in Star Trek Voyager (when confronted with why she was diverting power, she explained that in the Borg, if you saw a need or problem, you just took what you needed and fixed it). [I'm not even a Star Trek much anymore by the way, but some of you might be and "get/grok" this.]

This culture died when the Ivy-grads took over. And with it, our progress and innovative capacity--it rapidly fled the jurisdiction upon seeing the "respectable" people coming!

(2) Somehow I went from startups in SiValley

(not even a computer scientist! Though I notice few--even computer scientists--are apparently aware that "computer science" was originally "the science of processes", and if it's actual computer science, it's applicable in the REAL world--not just boxes: with potential for 1000's or millions of times the efficiencies available/seen now (no AI required)), 

to aerospace. Slow, methodical, careful/cautious--and damn good too!

Since we don't want planes falling out of the skies, and we want them to be reliable 

(er... https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2021/02/23/the-us-air-force-just-admitted-the-f-35-stealth-fighter-has-failed/ 

...it'll get better eventually, but there's a lot going on in that fearsome monster!) 

And mostly Ivy grads running the place--necessary to know the manners of D.C. and co.

Also corporate, inflexible. Seemingly ancient in thinking and processes for operations (that support the engineering and manufacturing)--vast firms in some ways more like mom and pop shops. 

Secure systems, but not so sophisticated--complex they are, just not sophisticated. 

RIGIDITY. Rigidity that means change and process innovations **to operations** that support things (the processes that generate things aren't meant here--they're fine and awe-inspiring, when you're allowed to know anything, that is), just grind to a halt most of the time in terms of advance/progress. 

And no surprise here: small companies tend to be like this. Big companies are companies that were small themselves and are rooted in the same problems of human nature, hierarchy/social games, limits to the human brain and how to do things...

And here's the funny part: imagine you walk into a room of really (no, REALLY) smart people. They've talked for TWENTY YEARS about some operational problem/need, and they're trying to get consensus, collaborative approaches, "on the same wavelength", and "all our stakeholders to buy-in." 

You from hack-it/entrepreneur-startup-land look at this and, not knowing better (yet), say 

"oh, you can solve this in 5 minutes with [x,y,z] and I can tell you the guy to pull from which department to do it now in front of us if you like?" (total talk time: 20seconds to 2 minutes) 

You, nobody-bozo in "what does he do again?" position in some location none of them have even seen.

It's not big, doesn't require some gargantuan proposal plan, political maneuvering, anyone's buy-in, consulting anyone, collaboration or opinions, making people feel good...you just get **** done. Or you provide an easy recipe to do so--likely the latter, as you just. don't. start. meddling. with. the. computers. without permission. (Did I mention, your solution also includes considerations like security etc. baked-in already?) 

Protip: don't do this. Even if it would save millions or billions, it doesn't typically go-over well. And people try to kill it. Fast and hard.

Another protip: if you're like this and find yourself in an environment like mine, listen and learn--every opportunity to try, reflect, adjust, repeat, and pick-up the manners and understanding of these (as above, genuinely REALLY smart people) is a good idea.

= What COULD be: 

You know, THIS happens ALL THE TIME in firms, large and small: "those" people (who speak-up like a damn bullhorn with something so elegant and clear and reasonable that it just must die) aren't heard. They don't know (without experience) that it's embarrassing, inconvenient, maybe a threat to years of prior negotiations and works (about which a lot of people may feel...uneasy already, and now threatened too for participating.) 

"Those" [problem] people...they're not academics-first or from affluent backgrounds (or if they are, they're rebels or autistics). They're often silently keeping things rolling along when there is literally an ocean of details you need to make decisions, but you must be in the trenches to know those details to have a sufficient informed mind to make the decisions, and they don't have the power to technically make those decisions...

Not really tooting my horn, but for a long, long time I was this guy--every company I've been in, I've solved some major problem or another, but being this guy also means few to nobody notices! Maybe your manager, who looks good if you're getting, quote, "IMPOSSIBLE" KPI's, but that's about all--and he's not going to recommend that you go anywhere like up in that situation!

= Applications

Smart people can be tactically savage returns-getters and problems-preventers if hired. Given the right tools (with which to build solutions and tools--which by nature don't just encourage, but facilitate, and stay out of the way of, them doing so) they can build global enterprises in almost no time, if you have a herd of these people (aka know where to look, how to look/examine, etc.) 

I've seen many mention getting the entrepreneurial and smart people who can just make things happen and that's good: awareness is rising (that business is for, you know, primarily achieving missions and objectives and avoiding problems and liabilities and making problems and stuff) that hiring never-done-drudgery degree-holders leads to...a lot of meetings and politics and things not happening. 

Yet there's little awareness of how to AMPLIFY the effectiveness of these people to be transformative--without, for example, being a startup with a few billion$ to spend at will. 

For me, that's the real problem and one I hope to make an ongoing project of interest--technical, social, etc., when I have a little time and success. 

= Current Work

Right now, my primary work is...getting attention just enough to amplify the potential and capacity in aerospace. 

It's been...glacial. Processes etc. meant for suggesting solutions and such, like speaking-up in the meeting of those talking about something for 20 years, just don't work. How can a committee of people who know nothing about technical things, evaluate technical things? Or let's say your IT chief is a major holder of certifications only in a certain set of technologies--why would he swap for other things that might improve the org, but put his feet on less familiar ground and potentially open-up space for others to have some sway or influence or promotion (and competitive) potential? 

In other words, you have to...make friends, connect with and learn from people and find...movers and "back-door" people with authority to go-around the processes in place (and advertised) for "solutions" and "bright ideas" and "innovative suggestions" and all that other nonsense. 

More recently, I've found such people, so we're beginning our (inevitable) meetings to implement a few things as tiny trials with huge-win potential, so that the results can blow out of the water any attempts for shutting-down those efforts before anyone even tries.

= why this?

I saw a somewhat-like mind on a certain professional site who was talking about how it paid big to hire smart, entrepreneurially-minded people to run their areas and let them be. I have no idea if, like me, he's really a guy who likes sharing experience/background (especially WILDLY divergent from your own--so hopefully you can infer new things), but I figured I would share with him--that is what this short meander through a tale of two businesses/industries is about.

To him, "you're on the right track (I think), and I would suggest some oddball-reading" (that is, "oddball" if you're not a software guy, but worth it):

"The Cathedral and the Bazaar", 

"The Mythical Man-Month", 

something on Unix Philosophy, like, http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/ch01s06.html), 

and https://stallman.org/articles/on-hacking.html 

(Note, Stallman--author of the last link's resource/article, has made controverted/controversial statements in the past, so many have hard feelings about him--he's likely Asperg as hell, so I wish people took that into consideration (and thought, "well...we should bug his associates to keep a more careful lid/eye/leash on him for his own good"), and he single-handedly insured software was opened-up for educational purposes and the freedom to try, play, modify, and see what happens--the right way to learn(TM)--so that anyone who wanted could actually learn engineering, software, and computer science without being extraordinarily wealth and connected.) 

These are software resources but not only software resources: they're about principles discovered that provide for extraordinary engineering and decision-making, generally. 

Of course, if you can't make heads or tails of them, but think you have some oddball problem that oddballs could handle, bug me any time. You know how to message me. (For comfort: I also stood-up the logistics operations for one of these large firms, so I'm familiar with just how "not-for-bozos" your line of business is.) 

Besides the information (I'm fascinated with learning about things that bore a lot of people), I'm actively collecting contacts--friends, networks, savagely smart types, cobelligerents, passionates, etc., as doing so lets me get to know people I can brains-pick and be inspired by (when they bother me about something, and force me to think about their needs/problems, which I may never have even considered were possible before), and potentially bother one day about doing something really cool (that is, when I find something really cool to do: I've already helped others transform the world economy and logistics once, so right now the next big thing seems somewhat hard to imagine--as Peter Thiel likes to put it, it's likely nothing anybody else has already done.)