If you don’t set a tempo for newness, you end up killing it
Q: Last week the column detailed how new products and ideas take time. How focusing on money first can be a red herring, a distraction from the necessary and foundational work of building community and commitment to the idea. That the idea is the portkey to the future.
You told that entrepreneur to “slow the f*** down.” Which is perfectly fine for a side hustle, but what about those of us with existing businesses, quarterly revenue expectations, and growth demands from our executive team and board?
Tell us the implications for birthing new ideas in corporate life?
A: You’re not slowing down for anything or anyone, right?
And you shouldn’t. Because we need you to innovate and deliver.
The question is, how do you set the right pace to birth newness? If or when you set the right tempo and the related metrics, you’ll ignite your folks’ bestest work. If you don’t, you’ll have people and efforts flame out.
I’ve seen this go so badly so many times, and I bet you have, too.
You can see it when your leaders in the organization suggest the next new thing will perform just as well (or come to market just as fast) as the existing core business which has had years to find its footing.
You know by setting that incredibly optimistic but unreasonable bar, someone will end up saying, hey, it’s not delivering as promised, and kill it. The newness is actually dead before it even really starts.
Or when a new product team conjures up a PowerPoint presentation to show a big “up and to the right” hockey stick revenue forecast, while you (and just about everyone else in the room) knows y’all don’t know enough yet to possibly know the actual size of the opportunity.
Creating inflated expectations & a culture of deception kills newness.
It’s far, far too common to put unreasonable time pressures and revenue expectations on newness (and the teams trying to incubate newness) when you’ll actually want and even need curiosity and space to just figure stuff out.
Newness requires time. How much time? Three to seven years. A rule of thumb I’ve developed from those 25 years of go-to-market work:
It takes 3x the effort to create a new product for an existing customer.
It takes 5x the effort to find a new customer for an existing product.
And 7x if it’s an all-new effort.
And, here are some supporting details:
I researched nearly 300 change-makers to choose the 20 I wrote about in detail in Power of Onlyness. Those were mostly about new ideas, into entirely new markets, and so it’s unsurprising that each of those case studies took at least 3 but more like 7 years to get to “success.”
And this pacing affects business models, too.
Take Google for example. Today, they serve up something like 87% of all the world’s information to you and I. But it took them years and years to arrive at the offer and business model to serve you and me for free, while charging advertisers — mostly small and medium businesses.
Few people know that Google’s first few years of revenue were generated by a work-for-hire arrangement. (A friend of mine actually cut the deal.) Google did white-label (meaning, no one knew it was them) work for their future competitor, Yahoo. It gave them enough runway to build out their own capabilities and then design the entirely new business model that is now the industry default for most media companies. They, like so many other companies, obscure this part of their history in all the tellings. Because it seems “slow”.
Yet, we can’t create newness if we treat it as the same as it ever was.
As you activate your teams, what does this mean for you?
Number one lesson: You’ve gotta get clear about what kind of newness you’re creating. Account for it.
If you don’t adjust for pacing, you send your folks on a kamikaze mission. Which does nothing for you, or them. Or Us. It has all the appearance of goodness, but no actual progress is made.
Instead, ask the clarifying questions. You need to find ways to measure progress that lets your team do the work. As discussed last week, take the time to
- find one’s people, or market
- co-create a value proposition, or offer
- build the needed trust, for a viable business model
If you pressure your team to do the 5x effort as if it’s a 1x thing, they’ll be forced into contortions. They could lie to you (never a good thing) to tell you what you want to hear, they could take shortcuts that make you feel like you’re making progress only to see it fail downstream, etc etc.
And that’s how you end up with frayed, disengaged, failing teams. They can’t be in integrity with the goal, so they can’t be fully alive and do what is needed.
Then you may ask yourself, how did I get here?
