A Barnyard of Entrepreneurs 2: Passionate Disruption

The animals were atwitter.  The final night of Disrupt! Barnyard was about to start.  

Rooster was nervous.  He had been asked to judge but felt out of place.  Last year's winner of the business plan contest had been an app that reminded cows to chew their cuds.  Rooster knew more than he cared to about cows, but he was pretty sure he couldn't have dreamed up that business in a million years.

Fortunately, Horse and Big Pig were also judges.  Horse had written a thousand articles about tech and knew his stuff.  Pig had made his name last year investing with two ducks in an ethanol plant.  ("Corn wants to eat the world" had become an important investment thesis at Big Pig's firm.)  Maybe Rooster would luck out and one of the final plans would involve corn.

Black Rat was up first. The crowd settled back, ready to be dazzled. "Hello everyone."  Rat looked nervous.  The crowd cheered, even the crows in back who could be counted on for a heckle or two as the night went on.  "I am a serial entrepreneur and tonight..."

Rooster stopped listening.  "Serial entrepreneur?" he whispered to Horse and Big Pig.  It didn't seem that long ago he had been chasing Rat out of the shed with the fermented corn feed crumble.  

A Barnyard of Entrepreneurs 1: Predicting the Future

Horse sauntered across the barnyard, heading toward the pig pen.  He had a clipboard strung around his neck and a stick tucked behind an ear, just like he'd seen the farmer do with his pencil.  The three pigs were rooting around in the mud for scraps, discussing an app they'd been pitched yesterday that reminded cows to chew their cuds.

"I really liked the team's focus," Middle Pig offered.  "But is the service a must-have or only a nice-to-have?  We are talking about cows, after all."

Just then Horse swung his head over the pit.  "May I have a word?"  He was the slightest bit hesitant.  The pigs had a well-earned reputation for being difficult.

The three barely paused, obviously irritated with the interruption.  They didn't have much use for the horse, who had, in the six months they had known him, never brought them so much as a rancid corn cob, much less a killer social media app.

"This is about celebrity," Horse added.

This brought the rooting to a sudden halt.  Celebrity was one of the few things besides slop (and killer social media apps) that could get the pigs' attention.  Horse knew his business.

"What is it?" Big Pig asked.  "And this better be good."

The Outsiders: The One Thing CEOs Need To Do Well

From time to time I've sat on endowment committees with truly smart investors.  I don't pretend to be one of those myself, but quarter after quarter I watched with them as the money managers came and went, the stocks and bonds went up and down, the markets rose and fell, the pundits huffed and puffed--and I listened really hard to what these investors inevitably and consistently said:  Most of the value in a portfolio is created in the allocation of assets.  In other words, the very first thing we did as an endowment committee was to set a risk profile and chose our asset classes.  That turned out to be the single thing that drove the most value long term.

You'd have thought it would have dawned on me that this powerful idea applied to operating businesses as well--the GEs, GMs, and Apples of the world--but no, sometimes it takes a sledgehammer.  And that's what I got hit with last weekend when I read William N. Thorndike, Jr.'s terrific 2012 book, The Outsiders: Eight Unconventional CEOs and Their Radically Rational Blueprint for Success.  (Thanks to my friend, Henry Ames, for gifting this great read to me.)

Thorndike opens with a simple question: "Who's the greatest CEO of the last fifty years?"  Some people might answer (incorrectly) Steve Jobs; others (like me, who are old enough to be a little confused on his dates: Alfred Sloan).  But the consensus answer is undoubtedly Jack Welch.  Welch ran GE for 20 years, achieved an annual compound return of 20.9%, and outperformed the S&P by 3.3 times.  Welch also played at business like Lawrence Taylor played linebacker (ok, for those of you who picked Steve Jobs: Ray Lewis) with a kind of high-energy, smashmouth style that got him magazine covers and lots and lots of press.  Welch was a hard-charging, gifted CEO, but compared to a guy named Henry Singleton, Thorndike says, Welch "wasn't even in the same zip code."

The Education of a (Diminishing) Baby Boomer

One of my favorite books is The Education of Henry Adams, published at Adams’ death in 1918 and winner of the Pulitzer Prize.  Henry was born in 1838 and witnessed a steady parade of innovation during his lifetime, from the railroad and telegraph emerging around the time of his birth to the electrical grid, telephone and automobile so pervasive at his death.  Adams grew up in a country half-slave and about to be torn asunder but died in one that was a unified, world power.  He saw factories in old age beyond anything he could have imagined as a child, and a nation of disconnected farmers turned into a mass market of connected cities.  These changes were so dramatic, Henry believed, “the old universe was thrown into the ash-heap” and something brand new had been created over the course of his lifetime.  “At the rate of progress since 1800,” Adams concluded, “every American who lived into the year 2000 would know how to control unlimited power.” 

We know better, of course, but were Adams to return and play with a smartphone, surf the Web or visit an automated factory, he might very well think we had arrived.

For me to have the same 79-year time horizon as Henry Adams, it would need to be 2036.  For me to have the same perspective I would need another 20 or 30 points of IQ, and it wouldn’t hurt to have grown up the grandson and great-grandson of Presidents.  Or, as Henry was, be a brilliant writer and historian.  Still, on the off-chance I don’t make it to 2036, I thought it would be worth surveying my own ash heap—or more properly now, my Municipal Solid Waste Landfill-- to see in 2014 what’s been tossed of my old world, and at the same time, what’s been created anew.

Keeping the Human Touch in Big Data

When I was growing up, people believed that there could never be a computer smart enough to beat a human being at chess.  Now, we know there may never be a human being smart enough to beat a computer.

What nobody anticipated, however, is that the very best chess "player" happens to be a combination of man and machine, or what the chess world calls Freestyle.  Man + computer beats computer.  There are several reasons for this, one being that humans can see where different computers disagree--not unlike a weather forecaster looking at three or four storm models--and work within the variations to achieve a better result.

Of course, if chess is ever fully "solved," like checkers is today, than the machine is fine all by itself.  But then, fully-solved problems have never been things human beings spend a lot of time worrying about.

Another example where human touch applied to data improves the solution is genealogy.  In the old days before the Web, it took a Herculean effort to build a credible, well sourced family tree.  Research dead-ends could be easily encountered just three and four generations back.  Data was hard earned, sometimes involving plane trips and convincing priests and town administrators to grant access to their precious archives.

Today, Big Genealogy is moving toward a single world tree, with all seven billion of us connected globally.  Seach your name and birth date and, voila, there's your tree.  It's not hard to envision the day when the act of building a tree will be among the least important tasks a genealogist undertakes.  (Even as I write this, a 23andMe email is chirping that it's found me a "4th cousin, with likely range to 3rd or Distant cousin.)

If you're lucky enough to have a family tree, though, you know that far too many of the names and dates are just that--bits of data.  These real people lived long, full, interesting lives but are now reduced to a few dates and places.