Hockey Stick or Slinky

Tonight NUventions hosted a speaker who took us through his journey of starting his own medical device company and ultimately leading it a multi-million dollar acquisition by a more renouned player in the market, customary in the med device space given the low IPO alternative for commercialization. The speech was great, and what I gleaned from it, as a budding entrepeneur, is that a successful idea is driven by three pillars: an inherently great product, persevearance, and luck. Even more important, however, is that the cliched term "the end justifies the means" does not apply in the journey of starting your own company and building it to fruition. The journey itself is as important as the end, whatever the end may be. You may cultivate an idea that seems perfect for the market, but there are factors ultimately outside all of ours control. In the medical device space, that factor happens to be a three letter acronym starting with F, but more importantly, if you fail to be flexible and are too tenacious to your original idea, focusing on the end that truly only exists in your mind and not in reality, then not only will your end fail to meet your expectations, but your journey will suffer too. That is not to say that you don't need to have a good, fundamental idea to start with, but in reality, what you ultimately bring to market, is in many ways influened and molded by what the market will come to demand from your product, and not what your expectations demand of it. This journey is an amazing one, and as the speaker recounted fondly his stories of developing pitch materials in his backyard, literally as we heard the birds chirpign in his videos, what came through was his inherent persevearance and belief that what he had created would ultimately add value to the market. He cautioned us that persevearance is much harder practiced than preached. Sure it's easy to say that I will persevere for my company, but when the rubber meets the road things change. The hockey stick of success most entrepeneurs believe in (the idea that their idea is an 18 month journey to early retirement) is in most times, or all times, foolish. Rather, every new company will face its successes, but those will be dampend by many failures: threats from competitors, threats from buyers, threats from regulatory stakeholders, even threats from within your own company. Success in entrepeneurship is a slinky, sinusodial with many ups and downs, and if you don't enjoy the journey, smile from your $0.002 milestone and sweat harder facing the $100,000 barrier, you will have wasted your time not maximizing on the knowledge you can build from simply walking the path.

Baxter's Kraemer introduces us to Kellogg

Harry Kraemer, ex-CEO of Baxter was our 1Y incoming speaker, and he was awesome. The room was in total silence as in walked a man in the top 1% of wealth in the USA, though he today drives a Toyota Avalon, and his insights from his time at Baxter following Kellogg were very moving. Kraemer teaches a class on leadership. and while many continue to argue whether leadership is natured or nurtured, Kraemer contends that this debate notwithstanding, there are simple facts that are critical of any leader. His equation, he's a mathematician, is pretty transitive: reflection = balance = confidence + humility. Critical of every leader is that the leader must be self-reflective, and I think at the heart of this process is the need of malleability. Change is essential, and if the leader, who drives the firm, is intransigent to change, then although he/she may be the right leader at the right time for the company, inevitably he/she will become too high a cost to the firm and the company will suffer.

Kraemer's words that rung with me were leadership is not about "being right, but doing the right thing". Of course, the counter-argument can be that if the leader is proven wrong consistently, he will lose the trust of his employees. Not true, since as Kraemer sees it, true confidence is having the ability to discern between what you know and what you don't know, and making clear to those who you employ of this difference. The strategic leader is he who then surrounds himself with the gaps in the leader's knowledge base to ensure that what the leader doens't know is relegated to someone who does, and more importantly, someone whom the leader trusts.

Thinking back more on how Kraemer leads, I find that his style of leadership is more focused on his internal structure than externally on the company's goals and let's face it, profits and market. But is this wrong? By the law of transitivity, if Kraemer builds a structure of leadership at his firm where the incentives and goals are mutually aligned within the company, then Kraemer is in fact focusing on the bottom line of the company. He just gets to do it while taking his daughter camping while the rest of his crew works over at Baxter. After all, he is CEO :)

Odinga talks at Kellogg

The PM of Kenya, honorable PM Odinga spoke this evening at Kellogg. What was interesting to me first of all was that the ABC (African Bus Club) @ K was expecting like a 20 student turnout, so they held the speech in RM 1246, which seats 30 people. Weren't they clearly corrected when over 200 people showed up, bitching at a chance, me included of course, to see/hear the PM talk. Needless to say, the speech was moved to Coonz :)

Onto the speech...The talk was interesting, short, and pretty much lacked clear direction. The purpose of the lecture series within which his talk was set was leadership in crises, and it is quite relevant to Kenya's current state, their consitution and election problems withstanding. Though the PM flowed between history of Kenya and African country independence from colonization and his personal anecdotes, what I gleaned from his talk was the immense difficulties these leaders face in making intangible decisions that have very real effects on the lives of thousands. For most of my career, the decisions I made were limited in scope to a budget of $250,000 of some pharma/biotech's Contracting budget, and at the end of the day, both the client and I the consultant went home to our beds and families (me to Hoboken and watching DVRed tv). However, the mere enormity of these leaders' actions, as Odinga contested, sometime paralyzes these guys to act; and at the end of the day, the worst action by a leader is no action, based out of fear.

What is crucial. and what I certainly learned from both my work experience and my fellowship at the NGO, is that opportune times and policy windows are the sine que non for successful changes, both in sight and in execution. A leader must not only know what to do, but when to do it. Odinga's redrafting of the constitution is a key example of his opportunism and his now interim successes.

At the end of the day, I was quite impressed with the talk. It's interesting to try and deduce the thought processes of these guys, who are in terrific positions of power to change for the better, understanding how they view problems, and more critically, how they engineer vehicles for change.