I’m a member of the Sabi Sushi team, a finalist at this year’s Mass Challenge.  Since the accelerator program, the company has made a huge pivot, centered around action, and I wanted to share our story with you.

When I was watching the video of your presentation, and started reading your book “Action Trumps Everything”, it seemed to describe Sabi Sushi to a tee.  We were spending about a year waiting for a good deal to come through on the traditional brick and mortar front, then chose to accept a spin on the idea suggested by our Mass Challenge mentor John Prendergast, giving ourselves a month to open “the restaurant without a restaurant”.  We hit that date and had our soft opening on September 1st!  Such a change in mindset has given our team an insane amount of wind in our sails, and we’re moving 100mph every day.

What really impressed me about your presentation was that even though you excel at fluently speaking in the language of business, it always comes back to making entrepreneurship accessible to everyone.  That’s a really powerful message and we really appreciate it.  We hope our ability to hustle and get things done can honor that sentiment.  One of our favorite authors is Malcolm Gladwell, and he has a great article about people mistakenly attributing genius to young age.  Your analogy with Monet seemed to also allude to the need to practice, practice, practice to perfect your craft.

You also made a great point about being ambidextrous (or bilingual) with both the business plan side and the small iteration side, and utilize them both when necessary.  I know we’re not there yet but I think we’ll definitely need to develop that talent.

Neil Chopra

Our premise for JobTacToe was predicated on Michael’s mailing list of 65,000 job seekers. We got such a positive initial response from them that we created the project. What we didn’t think through (and is blindingly obvious in hindsight) is that a mailing list of job seekers becomes stale very quickly; they all get jobs. After doing a few different tests of email campaigns to the list, we’ve established that the list is effectively dead. We’re getting less than 1/2 percent open rate, much less click through rate. Ouch!

We’re now in the process of re-evaluating our affordable loss. In order to make this project fly we need to:
1) attract enough visitors so we can start to measure what does and doesn’t work about the site
2) start measuring how people use the site
3) begin rearchitecting the on-site experience to be useful and valuable for people

I’m 99% confident that the site as it currently exists isn’t quite the right concept. Without traffic and users, however, we can’t know how it needs to be changed. And we’re still far away from getting traffic and users, because the marketing channel we were counting on didn’t come through. None of us are marketers by inclination, however, and we’re not exactly psyched about building traffic as a prelude to even figuring out whether the site works for people.

The question now is: what do we do? We’re meeting Thursday to have another affordable loss conversation and decide what we’re willing to commit, what we have, who we know, and what our end destination might be.

Best wishes,

Stever

The folks at Harvard Business Review Press are eager to design the cover of our book and to do that, we need to (finally) decide on the subtitle.

The title is locked.  It will be Just Start.

And while we love the idea–as just about all of you suggested–of using Action Trumps Everything as the subtitle, the nice people at HBRP thought it would confuse potential readers, given that is what we called the first version of the book.

And so, we have narrowed it down to the following three choices:

1. Just Start: The smart way to take action, embrace uncertainty and create the future.

Thank you for the wonderful experience at the recent sessions. I always seek ideas and ways of thinking that are new and inspiring.

I was struck by the UHaul example on the second day. It is entirely possible that many of the courses of action that we came up with might have worked even though our action plans were not what actually happened.

In the description of what did actually happen, it struck me how improvisational the process was. I, of course, am very familiar with musical improvisation. To me, the similarities between musical improvisation and entrepreneurial improvisation were striking. In musical improvisation, a musician has resources and limits. The resources include musical skill, desire to create, experience, and fellow musicians, among others. The limits include the musical framework of the piece (form, tempo, chord changes, instrumentation and so on), the time it takes to play the piece and, yes, one’s fellow musicians.

Once the music is set in motion, the improvisor seeks to employ all of the resources to the creation of something new and original. The improvisor sets out with an idea (a musical story to tell) and plays with intense attention to what the other musicians are doing. The other musicians, in turn, are intensely focused on what the improvisor is doing providing both support and affirmation and, possibly, new ideas for the improvisor. The improvisor responds to the ever changing musical landscape with a combination of the familiar and the new discarding what doesn’t work, changing direction, trying something new and making split second (real time) decisions that create the musical moment.

Not sure if anyone has made this comparison before but I thought it was worth sharing.

Thanks once again to all and best wishes.

Sincerely,
—
Sebastian Bonaiuto
Director of Bands, Boston College

We got that question in several difference forms, after our last post saying we were looking for a new sub-title for the updated version of our book.

The short answer is our publisher, Harvard Business Review Press (nee Harvard Business School Press) wants to make it clear to the world at a glance that the updated version is different than the self-published version we did.

We are working on a completely revised version of our book that will be published by Harvard Business Review Press.

We have a title we like–Just Start–but we are struggling with the subtitle.

The following will give you an idea of the things we are thinking of:

• Mastering Uncertainty and Creating the Future.
• Master Uncertainty and Create What You Want—anywhere in life.
• How to Master Uncertainty and Get What You Want–at work and everywhere else.
• How to Stare Down Uncertainty and Create What You Want—at work and everywhere else.
• The Best Way to Stare Down  Uncertainty and Create What You Want—at work and everywhere else.
• It’s the Best Way to Stare Down Uncertainty and Create What You Want—at work and everywhere else.

None of them are making our hearts beat faster.

Do you have any suggestions?

All this work, unfortunately, has taken time away from the blog.

Well, the good news is the end of revisions are in sight.

The blog resumes Monday. (We will see if my dog is up from his nap by then.)

As we said from the beginning of both the book (Action Trumps Everything) and the blog, are very much a work in progress.

Here’s today’s case in point. 

We have talked at length about how much you should put at risk in starting a new venture and, up until now (not surprisingly) we have referred to the concept as “affordable loss,” as in “ask yourself how much you can afford to lose.”

We are thinking of changing the term. 

The problem with “affordable loss” is that it sounds like a math problem. 

A. You want to make $100,000 on the venture.

B. You want a four to one return

C. You are willing to risk $25,000.

While the arithmetic is right, it really doesn’t take into account the desire driving your decision to create whatever it is you want to bring into being.

So, while rationally a 4:1 return makes sense, you might be willing to break even on your investment (or even lose money) if the idea is important enough to you.

As a result, we are thinking of changing the concept of affordable loss to acceptable loss, as in what is acceptable to you.

What do you think? Let us know.

The folks who said the Rapture was coming, said it would happen today and as of now, at least, my extremely mortal soul is still here.

But thinking about the Rapture got me thinking about desire and how important it is to creating anything new.

There are four “big ideas” that are central to CreAction, and desire is central to each one.  Consider:

Get started quickly with the means at hand. Absent desire, in the face of uncertainty, it simply makes more sense to think, study, predict. Why go into the unknown and less you want to? Desire is the force that gets you to take action.

Acceptable loss. What you can spend may be fixed but what you are willing to spend will change based on desire. And if your limit is, indeed, actually fixed, desire makes it more likely you will be creative in finding new sources of assets.

Bring others along. No one will enroll unless you are and obviously it is your desire that gets you to commit.

Build on what you find. Desire keeps you moving. Otherwise, in the face of obstacles it is easy to stop. Not only does desire give you the impetus to keep going it will drive you to find ways around the problems. This is no guarantee of success, but it’s the best you can do.

My guess is there were some people who used the fact that the Rapture was coming (or the fact it might rain; or they were tired, or the goldfish was sick…) to put off doing what they said they want to do. Sure sounds like a lack of desire to me.

The Yankees, who were concerned about Posada’s age–he’ll be 40 in a few months–turned Posada into a full-time designated hitter (DH) this year and the move is not going well.  He is hitting .165, more than 100 points below his lifetime average.

Because he is struggling so, the Yankees told him he would have to bat last in their order last night, and he refused to take the field reportedly saying he felt “disrespected,” news of which promptly filled the sports sections of N.Y. newspapers and airwaves of WFAN, the all-sports radio station.

So where do we fit in?

Well, the decision to turn to Posada into a full-time DH was a example of pure Prediction Reasoning.  The Yankees looked at the past (“catchers tend to break down as they age”) and said the future is going to similar to what came before (“Posada is an aging catcher, that means he is going to break down.”) and so they made the logical decision in the Prediction world (“will have Posada DH full time.”)

The problem with that approach is that human beings are not always rational.  Posada made it clear he was not comfortable just hitting.  It gave him too much time to dwell on things and if he made an out in his first at bat of the night, he tended to do poorly for the rest of the game.

It seems to me, the better solution would have been to introduce Posada’s changed role gradually.  Have him play catcher twice a week, for example, DH for four days, and have the other day off.

It couldn’t have gone any worse.