Some Innovations #1: The Home Runs

Last week, on vacation, I had the privilege of putting my daughter to bed.  I asked her, "What do you and Mommy pray about when she puts you to bed?" She told me, and I continued, "You know, you can talk to God just like you talk to me, and He listens.  If you are afraid you can tell Him, or if someone made you mad, or if you made someone mad and you want Him to know.  When I get quiet and alone and I pray, I can feel Him with me, listening, loving me just like I'm loving you right now.  Can you feel that?"

"Let me try," and she closed her eyes and squinted a little.  After a few moments, she opened here eyes and said, "No, nothing," and giggled.

I tried again.  "Sometimes, when I can get everything out of my head and open up I can hear Him--not so much in words--but feelings, letting me know if I have done good or bad, helping me understand."

Again she closed her eyes, and I could see her eyelashes fluttering.  After a long pause, she opened them, smiling.  "Nothing.  Not one thing.  Just emptiness."  We both laughed and I gave her a hug, inwardly acknowledging the work to be done and wondering how old I was when sensed God's presence, knew Him.  Maybe this is why I get such inspiration from the story of Joan of Arc, who listened to angels and did great things (like, say, winning a war that men on both sides had been losing for 100 years--fascinating story.)

Along with a bunch of mistakes, I've also done a few innovative things.  Innovation is strange, some combination of clearly identifying a problem (the hard part) and creativity and technical competence.  God is right there through all of it, and here are a few of the ways that my entrepreneurship and belief in God are intertwined:

1. Creativity:  For me, the creative moments are very similar to my prayer time, where I am trying to be in tune with what I cannot see and don't have sensory input about, and am seeking the unseen but true with all of my soul.  If God isn't with me in these moments, then He isn't. 
2. Truth:  One part of invention is being very in tune with the truth, obtaining a clear separation from what I wish and can imagine, and what is supported by data.  Seeking God is seeking the truth--they are inseparable.
3. Competence:  God has given me some competencies--I'm good with numbers, can understand complicated concepts and have good communication skills.  Without them, I couldn't do much.
4. Loving Others:  I often fail at this one, but my most worthwhile innovations have been the most selfless, the ones where there was a clear and obvious contribution that would benefit others--whether through a relationship, giving support in some way, or by anonymously creating something that will make lives better. 
5. Assimilation:  Innovation always involves seeing something that others cannot--assimilating sparse data sets and mapping unknown spaces.  This is akin to the creative moments, and only through prayer do guesses become more than guesses, something to believe in with a confidence that cannot otherwise be explained.  My frustrated colleagues will accuse me of drawing a line through a point or a curve through two.  Perhaps it is the confidence that comes from knowing God's love and care, but when I err it is on the side of being too conservative, not daring to tackle the really important problems, to face the more impactful challenges, to assimilate the sparsest of data sets, to believe in what cannot otherwise be.
6. Creation:  At the end of the day, what works and what doesn't is determined by what He has created, all a part of His wonder.  Everything I learn, every small innovation or change is one tiny piece in this massive puzzle which is His Creation.

Okay, now to talk about the inventions.  I'll start at the top, with the Home Runs:

Cleanliness is Next to Godliness

In a cleanroom, where they make the semiconductors that run your phones and computers and tablets and automobiles, even the tiniest particle can ruin a chip, and they go to great lengths to remove these particles by wiping everything in the room down several times a day.  The cloths they use are called cleanroom wipers, and are the cleanest cloth in the universe.  My first innovation out of graduate school was to eliminate 95% of the particles on the wipers. Here is a picture of the fibers in a polyester cloth, and you can see the debris on the surface.  In a full cloth, there are millions of particles per square meter--and we reduced the number from 50 million/m2 to 2 million/m2.  Here is the patent.  The product was immediately adopted by all of the major chip manufacturers--Intel, Motorolla, IBM, Texas Instruments.  This part of Milliken has since been sold, and the buyer told me, "The only thing about their business worth buying is the technology,"--this technology (and the next).  It's been in manufacture since about 1997, and knowing who has been using it and the size of the market, I'd estimate that somewhere between $500 million and $1 billion of these wipers have been sold over that period--the mainstay in this relatively small market.

Dirt, Come Hither!
As an follow-on to the above, we also wondered if you could make a wiper that picked up more dirt than other wipers.  Milliken had a broad technology they called "Visa," in which they did the opposite--made polyester cloth that would give up dirt easier in the wash.  So I ran around asking the Visa experts about their biggest mistakes, and came up with a wiper that, at low particle levels, could pull 95-98% of the dirt out of water by using a coating that was only a few atomic layers thick.  This was commercialized a few years after I left.  The sales may be redundant with the sales above, but I'd guess they top $250 million by this point, and the use is growing.  Here is the patent application.

A Pretty Hat for the Butterfly

Milliken makes a product called Millad that is used at low percentages in polypropylene to make it clear in applications like water bottles and Tupperware.  The molecule looks like this, which we called a "butterfly" with the head at the top right (the red "O"s), wings to the left and right and the body hanging down bottom left.  Back in the 1990s and early 2000s, I worked with a consultant (my best friend) to find the structure of the material, and when we did, we surmised that the butterfly could be improved if we gave it a hat--that is, attached some atoms to its head.  Now the chemists working on the problem at the time had made good progress with giving the butterfly new wings of one form or another, but they gave great resistance when asked to give it a new hat.  This is the equivalent to looking under the lamppost for the keys you dropped in the bushes because that is where the light is.  It took probably a year of making presentation after presentation and doing more and more and newer and fancier molecular modeling before one chemist finally gave it a try, even though it would be hard, or perhaps because it was hard.  Here is the patent.  The product was commercialized in 2008 or 9 and has since been added to a bunch of applications.  I can walk through a grocery store or Target and see the products and the improvement is obvious.  I love to  pick them up and smell them and wonder at all the great work that was done by that team of chemists once they learned they could put hats on the butterfly as well as wings.  Based on the market and how many times I've seen it in the store, I'd guess that it is quickly on it's way to being a $100 million/year product, but I have no direct knowledge.

That's enough for now.  Next I'll go to the other end and talk about the flops.

Entrepreneurial Mistakes #6: Delivering less than excelllence

Yesterday, the South Carolina Supreme Court listened to arguments in the Milliken vs. Morin case, the final time that this case will be heard in a South Carolina Court.  It was my honor and privilege to be able to participate in this proceeding, and I'm afraid I did not give due justice to the opportunity.

My attorney is a young associate who spent his formative years out of law school as a clerk for this same court.  He knows how it works, and knows the Justices.  He also has a keen legal mind he was able to wrap around the issues in the case quickly and with little help from me.  That being said, he is young and does not have decades of experience to help him navigate the proceedings as they are unfolding, and they unfold fast.

Blake's argument came first, and before he had taken his first breath, he was questioned by a Justice, challenging literally his first phrase.  He was trying to set context, and they challenged whether context was even important for a facial argument.  We are arguing that my employment agreement with Milliken was overly broad and made me unemployable after I had left the company.  They challenged the standard of review--to what standard should this agreement be held?  Could we include context, or must it stand by itself out of context?

Blake answered the questions admirably, only got flustered once, and did not give a single wrong answer.  The Justices came at him hard, challenging the phrasing of a "notice clause" which is buried in the margin of the third page of a finely printed agreement, in 7.5 point font, if that.  The Chief Justice even intentionally (I hope) misread the agreement, acting as if several "ors" were "ands," which for those of us who remember logic class (or digital circuits, in my case), make a tremendous difference in the outcome.

When Blake sat down, the Justices directed their questions just as hard at the opposing counsel.  "Do you mean that he can't test two things that don't work while working for Milliken, then after he leaves discover something that does?  Because of your agreement, he is not allowed to practice that and Milliken owns it?" one Justice asked. "He's not allowed to do anything related to textiles and chemicals?" another asked.

In this proceeding, Milliken acted like the shrewd manager in Luke 16.  Before Blake, I had a fine, experienced appeal specialist; they offered his firm significant business that would require him to drop me as a client.  They hired the best, most experienced lawyer available.  They had three of their own attorneys prepare him for every argument, so that nothing he presented was out of line with their future plans.  They used an out of state attorney, uncorrupted by the USC Law School club, to challenge the sale of the assets, disregarding the statements that had been made by their own attorneys in SC State Court.  In every way, they undermined the value of the assets, the financial stability of the opposition, and my ability to have our arguments presented fairly.  They did not just play well between the whistles, they poured mud near my goal line, repainted the lines, set up a wind storm, and bought my best player.  I'm sure if the refs were for sale, they would have done that, too.
 
At the end of the parable, Luke writes:

⁸ The rich man had to admire the dishonest rascal for being so shrewd. And it is true that the children of this world are more shrewd in dealing with the world around them than are the children of the light. ⁹ Here’s the lesson: Use your worldly resources to benefit others and make friends. Then, when your earthly possessions are gone, they will welcome you to an eternal home.^[c]

I accepted Milliken's bullying.  I allowed them to purchase the services of my law firm, to get away with sending this letter (see the comment below), to claim ownership of the patents after having lost the same ownership in SC State Court without further appeal, to scare off potential bidders on the technology, to place me in the hands of a very competent, but young, attorney.  In fairness, I may not have had the resources to tackle all of their maneuvering.  One resource that I have been given by God, though, is a keen analytical mind, and this is what I failed to apply, and in doing so failed to do as God has directed in this parable.  I did not take the time to go again through the arguments, and help Blake to finely tune his brief, to make sure that he understood the issues with crystalline precision so that he could have absolute confidence in his statements in front of the Court.  In one sense I was trusting God, knowing that He is bigger than any of these issues.  In another, though, I was taking Him for granted, failing to apply myself to what is clearly an important opportunity. This is where I failed, and can only ask for God's forgiveness and mercy.

At the end, one of the Justices asked Blake a direct question that came to the heart of the matter.  "Why are you pursuing this, if the ownership of the patents is not at question?" he asked.  Blake responded that Milliken would not acknowledge that the matter was settled, which is true.  But there is another element, one that was trained into me by my mother many years ago.  She taught me to stick up for the little guy, the person who can't defend himself.  She taught me that doing what was right, and seeking justice, is more important than accumulating wealth and glory for ourselves.

The truth, as is common, is a curious jumble of honor and sin.  Part of the reason for continuing was out of honor for for the court.  Before it was my decision alone, I was faced with the opportunity to put this issue in front of South Carolina's highest court--not the issue of my $25,000, but the issue of whether employers should be able to indenture their employees after they have left the company.  We had asked, and they agreed, to hear and rule on it, and following through was just honoring the Justices, giving them the opportunity to fix broken practices from the bench.  Part of it also was that Milliken would not offer a settlement, even though there was some discussion.  They refused to agree to a release.

I have had the privilege over the last several years to apply myself, in my own small way, to some of the greatest issues facing our world.  With the exit from Milliken, I have been able to play a role in addressing the indentured servitude that is placed on employees by certain companies through heavy-handed application of their employment agreements.  With Innegra, I helped develop a light weight, inexpensive ballistic fiber that, used property, can both save lives and reduce our dependence on fossil fuels by reducing vehicle weight.  (That I am prohibited from helping it go forward solely by the belligerence of the current owners is a big frustration.)  With Dreamweaver, we get the privilege of addressing directly our country's reliance on fossil fuels, and hopefully reduce or eliminate the need for young men to go to foreign countries to die for our right to $3 gas. These opportunities are God's gifts to me, and if I fail to apply myself 1000%, then I am letting Him down.

Entrepreneurial Mistakes #5: Hiring Mistakes

Here's a story I heard recently:  A young MBA student had the chance to meet with a wise old CEO who had taken his company to great heights.  He only had a few minutes, so he chose his questions carefully. 
"What I would really like to know," asked the MBA student, "is how you got to be so successful?"
"Oh, that one is easy," said the CEO.  "It comes from having good judgement."
The MBA student was not going to accept such a short answer.  "Well, then," he asked, "how did you get good judgement?"
"That--oh that comes from experience."
Maybe a little frustrated, the student asked one more, "Where did you get the experience?"
"That comes from having bad judgement."

The mistakes below are not like the big hiring mistake that was described in Entrepreneurial Mistake #2, but rather fall into the category of "bad judgement."  In any case, they are mistakes I'd like to not make again.

Hiring Mistake #1:  Hiring first employees as Vice Presidents
This one is more subtle than it sounds.  There are people who are terrific for a company of 3-5 people, who really are the Vice Presidents of that company and carry a load like could never be described--but who also just are not the right people to lead a group of 5-10 employees, and become seriously challenged with groups of 25-50 employees.  In these cases, hiring the employee was right, making them the leader of their function was right early on, but the mistake was instead in giving them the expectation that they would remain in a leadership role indefinitely.  (I mean, outside of a bank, how many vice presidents can their be?)  All of these people were outstanding contributors when I had them in the right role, and the mistake was in letting them believe that the role would last forever.

Hiring Mistake #2:  Hiring real executives too soon
This one is again subtle.  I have a gentleman that I truly respect, who had been a consultant for the company for some time and had real and genuine enthusiasm for the technology, the industry and the team.  He was so talented that when he sat me down and explained to me, for two hours, that he was ready to join the team, I made room for him by giving myself a promotion to CEO and making him President.  That wasn't the issue. The issue was that he was used to running a company of 80-100 people, and didn't understand when I told him we weren't going to spend money on a cleaning service and where the broom was.  His first acts were to decorate his office, hire an HR consultant, attempt to hire a cleaning service, and tell me that I had to fire my best employee or he would leave.  "Why?" I asked.  "We don't work well together," he said.  "It's him or me."  My response was, "He is a terrific employee and a good friend and I think you should learn to work together."  He quit less than 90 days after he joined, but stayed on as a consultant and board member, and never really got over the scars formed by the right person joining the right company at the wrong time.

Hiring Mistake #3:  Hiring order takers as sales people
In the course of running Innegrity, I hired about a dozen different sales people, and all but two and a half of them stank in the role I gave them.  This was my fault, not theirs, because all of them had excelled in the role of salesperson at different, established companies.  The problem was that, in a big company with established product lines, the role of the salesperson is really to take orders and facilitate communications, but the product has already been sold to the customer.  This is especially true in industries where there isn't much growth, much white space left to conquer.  For those industries, a salesperson might be very successful at winning accounts from customers who were buying from their competitors, but even in this case, the customer is already buying the product, and is now making a supplier decision.  A completely different skill set is required to convince a customer to take on a new product where the primary competitor is inertia and alternatives that perform very differently.  In hiring people who were very effective in the role of catcher, I did them a disservice by asking them to be pitchers.

Hiring Mistake #4:  Hiring some friends
Careful here, because I am not saying don't hire friends.  My very best employees were friends, and I would hire them again today.  In fact, I am desperate to hire two of them, but won't get the opportunity because, frankly, I've used those chips. I love them both and will not disrupt their families or their lifestyles again.  However, the decision to hire friends should be made very carefully, and only with the understanding that either the friendship will survive a quit/fire decision, or that you are willing to give up the friendship if the situation arrises where one of those is necessary.  The mistake and challenge here is the potential to hold onto a friend too long, to have a blind spot for lower performance, and not move to correct it.  The problem isn't with the friend--it is with the person doing the hiring (me, in this case) who may not be objective.  In taking the role of President or CEO of a startup, you are making a bunch of unspoken promises to investors, customers, and other employees that the needs of the company will come higher than everything except your God and your family, and there is not room for compromises that can crop us with an underperforming employee who is also a friend.

Hiring Mistake #5:  Being loyal to underperforming employees
I'm a doggone collie, and will coach, help, cover, extole--anything to keep an employee performing at a level that the rest of us can put up with.  The silver lining to this is that it has earned me extraordinary loyalty from people who have worked for me, and also in several cases helped me to find the right role for employees who were underperforming in a different role.  The mistake was not in keeping employees who worked hard and weren't effective, but rather more subtle.  I kept employees who were relatives of friends/employees, giving them oh-so-many chances to improve.  I kept employees who were started as full-onboard members of the team, but who later checked out. I kept employees who had left comfortable jobs at big companies but couldn't adjust to the dynamics of a small company.  I kept employees who refused to take a leadership role when it was necessary.  I kept employees who were knowingly overlooking serious flaws in the systems they were running (to my credit, I didn't learn of this until after I fired them, and then only as retribution).  "Hire slow and fire fast," is very good advice.

Hiring Mistake #6:  Not praying
While I ran Innegrity for seven years, at our peak we only had 25 or so employees, and so you may wonder how I could make so many mistake in such a short period of time and somehow still achieve what everyone involved would call a technical and marketing success (but financial failure).  The fact is, every one of those mistakes could have been avoided if I had just taken the few short moments to lay them at God's feet and ask for guidance.  In almost all cases, I did not, and suffered the consequences of having made the decisions alone, rather than with the help of the Almighty.  It was arrogant and unfair to the other employees, to the investors and to God not to let Him play a more pivotal role in the day-to-day running of the company.

Entrepreneurial Mistakes #4: Signing what was put in front of me

Most of my other mistakes were interesting.  This one is Important, with a capital "I".  It will be heard shortly in front of the SC Supreme Court, and at stake is whether big companies can use overbearing employment agreements to prevent innovation, suppress entrepreneurship, and hold their employees hostage.

My Employment

In 1995, my PhD was newly minted, and I really wanted to work in the research department of a big company on I-85 between Atlanta and Richmond.  Milliken fit the mold, so I signed what was put in front of me on the day I started.  Looked oppressive, but I had no choice.  See this document.

Nine years later, they had gone from almost 30,000 employees to 14,000, and there was no sign of the trend abating (they are now maybe 6-7,000), so I made a huge leap of faith and jumped ship, mortgaging the house to start a new company, Innegrity.

I thought that since I was only using public information in my new company, and since I was not going to compete with Milliken, I would be clear.  They took issue, and filed a law suit in 2005 which was taken to court in 2007.  We either won or they dropped seven of nine counts, and the other two resulted in a $25,324 fine.  Polled later, the jury said that I had not been fully dedicated to my job during my last few months at Milliken and so they had awarded back to Milliken a portion of my salary.  I don't agree, but can see their logic.

The SC Court of Appeals upheld the verdict, and then it got interesting.

The Setup

In 2009, after the Appeals ruling, we were worried that the statute of limitations hadn't run out in Federal Court and so we would only agree not to petition the SC Supreme Court if Milliken would agree to a full release, which they would not.  So we appealed, or rather, petitioned for a writ of certiorari, asking them to hear the case.  Milliken did not appeal, so if allowed it would be one-sided.

Not until 2011, after I had been let go from Innegrity, did the SC Supreme Court allow the petition (agree to hear the case).  I'm told they deny 95%, and if they agree to hear something it's because they see a strong argument to make a change.  What kind of change is anybody's guess, and it could be either good or bad for the petitioner (me). 

At this point, the choice to continue was mine and mine alone.  My law firm, who was owed a lot of money by Innegrity, wanted to drop me and actually paid me a nice sum of money to allow them to work on unrelated issues for Milliken in the future.  They recommended a new firm, who said it would cost $25,000 to try the case.  The new lawyers immediately got a call from Milliken's attorneys asking if we were interested in dropping the case, and another $25,324 plus interest (my money that had been put in escrow) was offered up.

So I had the choice of accepting the money from the law firm (which I did), keeping my $25,000, getting another $25,324 and walking away from a complicated and longstanding conflict.  Seems like a no-brainer, right?  I believe, but have no proof, that it was carefully orchestrated.

I love finishing things.  I get a real sense of satisfaction at the bottom of a box of Cheerios, or when a can of shaving cream runs out.  This seems rediculous to write, but is true.  I also am physically unable to walk away from a lawn that is half mowed, a room half vacuumed, or a load of laundry that is half folded.  Forces of nature keep me there until the job is finished.  Thank you, Dad.

So I told the lawyers to move forward, and the brief, response, and reply to response were all filed. This is not interesting reading, so open at your own risk.

The Issues

Milliken's employment agreement had two pieces that we took issue with.  First, they define as confidential (and require me to hold confidential) any information related to their business that they hold confidential.  Thus, information that is publicly available can be held confidential.  Many of us have signed confidentiality agreements, and there are either four or five exceptions, including pubicly available information, information received from others, etc.  This confidentiality clause has no exceptions.

Second, they claim ownership of all inventions that I come up with during my employment and up to one year after I leave the company.  So all the work I did during my first year at Innegrity belongs to them, according to the agreement. The inventions do have to be related to "the business of Milliken," which they define to be all of chemicals and textiles.  Pretty broad.

Our argument is that this violates longstanding law with regard to confidentiality agreements, and that they both act as an effective non-compete agreement, without the required restrictions in geography, etc. that are required with non-competes. 

The Rest of the Story

Since the time when I decided to go forward with the petition to the SC Supreme Court, I have had my old company driven into bankruptcy, had three law suits filed against me and one suit filed against my new company.  In each case my response is to shed light on the truth and expose things that others are hiding.  I feel like I'm leading a group of spelunkers and am the only one with a map and a head lamp.

I'll never know whether all of this is carefully orchestrated by a behind-the-scenes puppet master, or whether it is the product of me being the "brawny one" among my father's three sons.  Frankly, it doesn't matter as long as I can keep God's precepts--love your God, love your neighbor, judge as you wish to be judged--in front of me.  He will provide, and I will grow from the experience.  There are nights, though, when I would rather write a blog post than sleep.

There are two questions here: the first is, should I have signed such an oppressive employment agreement in the first place?  Or maybe better, should I have gone to work for a company that would write one?  Milliken, like New Jersey, is a great place to be from.

The second is, given the opportunity to walk away with a new car and a life with less conflict, should I have taken it?  Yes, I'm giving the courts a chance to rewrite the law--but they'll do that anyway, won't they?  It's subtle, and while I can explain and defend both decisions, I would call them both mistakes, and would certainly do things differently if I could do them over.

Entrepreneurial Mistakes #3: Making Things Too Complicated

I have a PhD in physics.  My dissertation was in disordered materials, one of the most complicated subjects there is.  I can understand complicated subjects more easily than other people.  Anyone anyone who has seen this in action will acknowledge that it can be more of a fault than an asset.

Here's how it works:  I get something, find it very elegant, and underestimate the difficulty it can cause.  Since I don't think I'm unique in this among entrepreneurs, let me illustrate it with a couple examples.

Corporate Structure
Innegrity has probably the best corporate structure possible, put together by some extraordinarily smart lawyers.  All of our ownership was common stock--nobody had any preference over anyone else.  However, all of the ownership was participating common stock.

Here's how it works:  when the company liquidates, all of the money would first go to pay people back the cash that they put in, proportional to that cash.  After everyone gets their money back, anything left over is spread by ownership, in different proportion than the first amount.  Sounds reasonable, and fair, and it solves a lot of the problems that come with adding a new level of preference to each investment round. 

The problem is, nobody understood it.  What are shares worth?  Well, that depends on what you paid for them. Every share differs, based on what was paid.  One person could own shares purchased in three different rounds that had three different values, and would pay out differently when the company was sold, even though they were the same kind of share.  In addition we also had complicated convertible debt structures, each with it's own conversion and payout rules, the sum total of which is impossible to understand.  (Except that I think I still have it memorized.)

So all the benefits--that I woudn't win unless every other investor did too, that all the capital was going to get paid back first, that nobody could be a big winner while other people lost money, that even in a down round, as long as there was equity in the company, everyone was still ahead--all those benefits were lost because everyone just thought of their shares as being worth a certain price.  So even though we had built a structure that protected investors from a down round, we didn't build a structure that protected them from the anxiety that came from not understanding it, and so the value was lost when eventually the investors revolted and replaced me with a team of amateurs who drove the company into bankruptcy.  There was no need, but to this day you can't convince them of that.

What should I have done?  Started with a conventional C-corp, with common and preferred shares, just like all the Dow and S&P companies and everyone else.  People understand these structures, and know how to value them.  Even sophisticated investors who were thinking of investing at the end had no idea what to make of our structure, and so, like everyone else, they ignored it.

Market Structure
Innegrity was in a very complicated market.  Our business plan was simple--we were going to buy polymer chips, process them into a high value fiber, and sell the fiber.  The rest of the access to market was difficult, though, with all the decision making power at the very end.  I had experience in the industry and with pull through marketing and also, as I said, could see through this easily.  However, there are things I could have done to aleviate this that I didn't do because I underestimated their effect.

In the rope market, our customer would make a rope and then either process it into an article made from a rope (say, a rigging for a sailboat) or sell it to someone who would.  This would either be sold to a distributor, or to someone who would sell direct to customers or through retail. This was one of our more simple markets, and there could be as many as four different companies between us and the actual consumer who decided what to buy.

At the other end was aerospace.  We would sell fiber to a weaver, who would sell it to someone who would coat it with a resin, who would sell it either to a distributor or to someone who would make a part, who would try to get the part qualified with the FAA and sell it either to the owners of aircraft, or to the OEM, who would then sell it to the purchaser of an aircraft.  There could be as many as seven people in the marketplace who could say "no" before it ever got presented to the end user.  Ballistics was just as bad, or worse because of all the qualification testing required.

I called all these people in the middle "channel partners," and most of them had little or no ability to say "yes" to a sale, but all had the ability to say "no."  It took us almost two years to get the full channel aligned so that an end user could actually start purchasing things.  Eventually, we had over fifty channel partners, each of which had their own product lines that contained Innegra fiber, with their own product specs, quality controls, relationships with each other, etc.  Two years later, we had sixty end users who were using the fiber, had generated four world championships and were converting new end users at a rate of 4-5/month. 

But we still had only a couple million dollars of trailing twelve month sales, because the first ones to convert were necessarily the ones with the shortest path to the end user, and small.  Example:  surfboards:  we sold to the weaver who sold to the board manufacturer, who sold directly to the user, or perhaps through retail.  If there was another level of complexity--say distributors, or board rental companies--it took longer.  For most of the others, we had to align a full value chain for each end user, and while my VP Sales was a master at this, he got no credit for it because only I understood how difficult it was.  At one point we had a half dozen experienced sales people with industry experience who were dumbfoundingly ineffective while Loren piled up success after success.  In the end, though, they came too slowly.

What should I have done?  Focused hard on eliminating levels of complexity.  Toll weaving would have eliminated one.  I could get rid of another by choosing one exclusive distributor and using my sales team to travel with and train their sales team.  To get a fast start, we could have eliminated all effort in markets that would require more intermediaries, going hard for the simple parts that didn't have to be integrated, most of which were in sporting goods, but also ropes and other simple parts for some industrial applications. 

Dreamweaver
My new company has incorporated this education.  We are a simple C-corp with no debt and only a few owners.  We are very capital efficient, and are looking to have only one financial partner before we get to cash-flow positive.  We buy fiber and process it into a material that is sold to the user with the decision making power, in this case a battery manufacturer.  While there will be some brand-building, there are no converters, no distributors, no coaters, no intermediate part manufacturers.

Entrepreneurial Mistakes #2: Only the very best talent

I've rethought that Friday afternoon so many times.  I had been asked by a trusted customer--a partner, really, to come visit them on a Friday afternoon.  Alone.  He had something he wanted to talk with me about.  Let's call him Scott, after my wife's grandfather.

Scott was about the same age as my father, and after working with him for a couple years, I'm sure he thought of me fondly and wished the best for me as I did him, even as he knew that his company wasn't the best customer for our product.  They did development, worked with our terrible early product to make fabric, taught us was was wrong so we could improve it.  To this day, I don't think they've sold any.

"It's just this simple," he told me.  "If you work with him, we won't work with you."

"Him," in this case, was an employee I was considering hiring, who had been working with us as a consultant.  Let's call him Allen.

Allen had quite the resume.  He had worked for a customer, running a business that, depending on when you asked him, was either $60 million, or $260 million.  Whatever.  In any case, he was without a job, and knew the industry quite well.  Players took his call.  He could get meetings set up.  Open doors.

I have on many cases given the advice not to hire Rolodexes, but rather hire people with integrity and talent. 

In any case, I didn't listen to Scott.  For over an hour I asked the nitty-gritty questions.  Did he sleep with the help?  No.  Hand in the cookie jar?  No.  Cheat?  No.  Lie?  No.  Then why?  He was competitive.  I like competitive.  Silence.

There were two of them in the room--one was a vice president I didn't know.  I'm very straightforward, and don't like to read between the lines.  But they were not going to lay it out straight.  "You need to listen, Brian.  I'm not going to say anything more than this:  If you work with Allen, we won't work with you."

I'm still friends with Scott.  I did hire Allen, and they stopped working with us.

Just so you know I had more than one data point, I'll relay a story that Allen had told me prior to me hiring him.  They had a big customer that had been putting price pressure on them for a couple years, and forced several concessions.  Then the market tightened up.  Allen invited his customer to a nice dinner--several people eating filets over dim lighting.  He pulled out a bag with boxes wrapped in thick paper and ornate bows, and walked around the table handing one to each customer.  They opened the gifts to find inside a nice new tube of KY Jelly.  "Gentlemen, you're going to need this when you hear your new pricing," he said.

My only defense is that, coming from Hendersonville, North Carolina, that was so far outside of my experience realm that I had no idea how to take it.  I had no reference point.  I still don't...and don't want one.  And he bragged about it.

Two other people who had worked with him in the past came to me and told me, in no uncertain terms, that if I made them work with him they would quit.  I told them he would be completely customer focused, and they wouldn't have to deal with him.  I was true to my word, but hired him anyway.

Here's how it worked out.

Within weeks, I heard back from a trade show that he had screamed at the CEO of one of our larger customers on the trade show floor.  Two people called me, and two others confirmed it

Two weeks later, he set up a high level meeting with a customer.  They were presenting to us--sharing their market data and their feelings on the size and position of an opportunity of one of our products.  In the meeting, Allen didn't let them get more than a few slides into the presentation before he had stood up and was making the presentation for them.  At one point, I interrupted Allen and asked the customer a direct question, "What do you think?"  Allen walked over behind him, put his hands on his shoulders, and said, "I've got this one," then proceded to answer.  This, in front of the CEO of the customer's company.  The customer, who should have been presenting this to us and his CEO, sat there, red faced and tight lipped. The conversation digressed onto a side point, and we decided to reconvene at another time after we'd come to a conclusion on that point.  The customer never finished his presentation.

I said not another word during the meeting, but decided to try to coach Allen on the ride home.  How to let customers speak, to ask pointed questions, learn from them, let them look good in front of their bosses.  He didn't take it so well, to say the least.  I don't lose my temper, but I know what it looks like.

I asked the customer to send me the presentation.  The last slide was, basically, "Your new fiber rocks, is exactly what we have been looking for, has huge market potential, and we are the perfect partner."  They never got there.

By that time, Allen had flown to Europe to be introduced to our partners there.  I shared the presentation with another of our salespeople, then left the office around 5pm.  About five minutes later, my phone rings, and it's Allen, screaming at me. I let him go on for several minutes, then when he paused, asked quietly, "Have you been drinking?"  He admitted it, then lept onto second semester of Scream University.  When he came up for breath, I suggested that he go to bed and call me in the morning, and hung up while he was still yelling.  I called a board member, and, taking his advice, decided I had to fire him.

The story doesn't end there, but that's where I'll stop.  Hiring is never simple, but there is no excuse for hiring anyone about whom there is any question, or even a hint of a question.  Hire only terrific people, and pass on anyone who even possibly could be anything less than perfect.  You cannot be too picky, and unsolicited negative recommendations absolutely cannot be overlooked.

I will end with this:  among a few terrible hiring decisions, I've made some very, very good ones, and will be forever grateful for the sacrifices that these folks made and the loyalty they showed.  I wish I hadn't made a few of the decisions that I did, because if I could take back just a few key ones, these folks would have achieved the success they deserved.

Postscript:  I wrote this last night, and it's so hard to think about.  Innegrity was a technical success, a market success, but a financial failure.  There are a lot of structural problems with how thing happened--we spent too much too soon, took too long to figure things out and make things happen in both production and the market, took too long to learn where our pricing needed to be.  But at the end of the day, the biggest mistakes, the ones that couldn't be undone, were people mistakes.  I was blessed with a terrific team that worked well together and was very capable, but there were a few participants that I invited in (so it's my fault, my responsibility at the end of the day) who were like a cancer eating at the company from the inside.

I wanted to be able to have them get along, to work with the team, but a couple seemed so bent on conflict, on redirecting things to suit themselves...it is tough to think about, and difficult for me to understand.  But it does underscore the point of this post, which is that in a start-up environment, you are not seeking the top 10%, but the top 0.1%--the very best of the best, the ones who will for absolute certainty put all their energy into pulling on the same rope.  And if you are not certain that this candidate is in that top 0.1%, you have to pass and wait for the next one.

Entrepreneurial Mistakes #1: Minimize Overhead, Take One.

At lunch last week, friend and fellow seriel entrepreneur said, "Nothing can replace learning from experience."  He followed it with, "The great thing about being a lawyer was that I could learn from experience, but it was other peoples' experiences, so I got to learn while my clients took the lumps." 

True, and valuable.  I thought I'd share some of my mistakes from my first few ventures.

Mistake #1: Minimize Overhead, Take One

I can remember distinctly the morning I realized that I had to build a special machine to manufacture Innegra fiber.  I had been up all night watching a few thin lines of fiber crawl through a good friend's fiber machine, breaking out every time the HVAC kicked on, every time the water evaporated, every time the oven blinked...every time it felt like it.  We ran for 24 hours and ended up with about 30 lbs of scraggly, lumpy fiber that I was later barely able to weave into a few dozen yards of seatbelt-like fabric.

I should mention here that the scrappy seatbelt fabric tested fantastic, like nothing else in the world.  But it was miserable to make.

That morning, tired and frustrated after only three hours of sleep in the local no-tell motel, I talked through the economics of my friend producing the fiber.  IF we could get to 50 lbs/hr, (50 times our effective output on our 24 hour run) and IF we could basically eliminate scrap and IF we spent $40,000 to upgrade the machine--then he might be able to make it for us for about $0.25/lb more than what I was hoping our selling price would be.  Somehow in this frustration, I decided that Innegrity needed to build a pilot machine ourselves, and set about designing it, purely from my imagination.  I still knew almost nothing about the process and what it would require at scale.

As it turns out, my good friend may have been willing to invest the $40,000 and we could have run a few dozen trials on his line for minimal cost, then paid him to make the fiber and sold it at cost until we reached some volume.  It would have been a zero overhead business, and we could have spent $200,000 to generate my first $200,000 of sales and started almost immediately.  Doesn't sound like much of a business, until I describe what I did instead.  Here goes:

I chose to build a pilot machine.  This required a year to build the machine, took another year to get it going right, and cost us $400,000 in hardware plus that much more in people, rent, and soft charges like power, utilities, internet connections, etc.  Raising that kind of money early on was a major distraction, and major time sink.  I asked my best friend in the world to leave his cushy job at IBM, take a big pay cut and move to Greenville SC, where it is very difficult to be single in your late thirties and maintain a 90 hour work week.  He built the pilot machine and made it work, for which I will be forever grateful.  But he was miserable and left two years later and our friendship barely survived.  The decision in early 2005 to build rather than continue wrestling with outsourcing resulted in a pilot scale product launch two years later which was received with "This is great, but your quality stinks, and we need 10 times as much as you can make."

I'll tell you what we did after that next time.  This story only gets better.

Had I made the other choice, to partner with a trusted friend as a manufacturing partner, we could have paid as we went, and after maybe $50 - $100,000 and maximum six months, had enough fiber to test the market, and found out that the selling price needed to be 3-5 times what I thought it should be, because the value was so much more than I anticipated.  But, alas, I believe pricing and value is another mistake to describe.  This series may take a while...

Always Improve

1. Be a gentleman and a professional at all times.
2. Be the person who deserves the things you want.
3. Never complain or explain.
4. Take credit and responsibility.
5. Everyone is special.
6. Always improve.

Okay--last one in this series, and perhaps the most difficult, because it involves motivations as much as actions.

I can remember when I was younger and played on the Hendersonville High School football team the coach hung big posterboards in the weight room that had bar charts at each weight station showing who had "maxed out" at what weight.  It was a huge motivation for me--I wanted to be the best, lift the most, be the strongest. The coach made a big deal when someone improved their max, getting a red marker and drawing a rectangle on the end of the black bar that marked our original max.  The improvement was in red--very visible.  As I worked out, I had dreams of growing my red bars, but also of playing college and professional football, of being wealthy, of retiring in my thirties.

Just writing that is difficult now, because it involves such a different worldview.  I saw my value through other people's eyes, through fame, through wealth.  The coach put up a chart saying what he valued, and the rest of the team adopted that value--strength.  We grunted and sweated and pushed and pulled, and when we weren't in the weight room, we talked about it.  It became our value system, which is embarrassing now because it is sooooooo shallow.

(For those of you who don't know me well, I am much more interested now in how I can contribute than in what I can get out of it; in the reality rather than other peoples' perceptions, and I rely on God for my sustenance, rather than having a goal of accumulating wealth.  I can't imagine going back to the insecurities of my younger, less mature value system.)

When I put these guidelines together, I thought about many ways to write this one--"lifelong learning," "keep growing," and even including specific goals such as love, wealth, security, intelligence.  In the end, I chose something that would endure many seasons of life.  What I valued as a high school football player is not what I value now.  What I value now is not what I will value when my kids leave the house, when I retire, when I'm on my fifth company, rather than my second.  However, wherever I am, whatever values are current in my life, there will always be opportunity for improvement, and thus the simple phrase, "Always improve."

Dreamweaver International

I have now started my second company.  Dreamweaver International will use nanofibers to improve energy storage in rechargeable batteries--think cell phones, laptops and electric and hybrid vehicles. 

In running Dreamweaver, I want to improve on what we did at Innegrity.  Some improvements are simple, such as choosing a technology without large capital requirements, choosing an industry with direct access to customers, choosing an industry with faster growth dynamics and a higher innovation rate, choosing to minimize overhead by leveraging external resources, choosing an industry with early exit opportunities.  These are structural, are a direct result of learnings from running Innegrity and can be built directly into the business plan.  As I think back, I find it amazing that Innegrity ran for so long and accomplished so much even in adverse conditions and with structural flaws in the business plan.  It can only be attributed to the people on the team and their energy, their drive, and frankly their ability to believe that we could do it despite all the headwinds we faced.

That leads us to the people, and a few mistakes that turned out to be absolutely critical.  Most of the people in the company were good employees--very talented, reasonably hard working, and motivated by both personal gain as well as being a part of something that was going to do good in the world.  The material, after all, was going to stop bullets, and it's difficult not to think through the ramifications--lives saved, families kept unified--especially when it was front-and-center with the whole team, every day.  They made sacrifices every day for the greater good.  For this and their dedication, I was and will remain very, very grateful.

Along the way, however, we accumulated a few employees who never let go of that high school worldview, and it brings us to the question of personal motivations and how important they can be.

A Difficult Decision

Recently, I was faced with a difficult hiring decision.  One candidate, "Terri," was terrific.  She had graduated cum laude from USC, had a great personality, and...well...we connected.  I asked her what her passion was, and she said, "helping people, and being a positive influence in their lives."  I asked for her to describe a time in her life when she had faced adversity, and how she dealt with it.  She said, "I was a black female baptist in Utah," and described how she had kept a positive attitude and kept doing the things that she needed to despite all the attitudes and preconceptions she faced.  I don't cry much, but as we talked through all of this I had tears wetting the corners of my eyes.

All of her examples, though, were around her real passion in life, which is to act.  How she got a part in her third grade play.  How she wanted to use her acting to be a positive influence, and how she chose parts that allowed her to do this.  How acting had helped her stay centered in difficult racial and religious environments.

I ended up with another candidate I really liked, and so a difficult decision.  I talked to people I trust--the recruiter, my management team, and my wife.  They unanimously chose the other candidate, who had started two companies of her own and had a much broader and more relevant skill set--accounting, advertising, marketing, customer service--rather than basic office skills.

The advice was right, but I still nearly cut across the grain and hired "Terri," even acknowledging that the other candidate would get started faster.  In the end, it came down to doing what was best for them.  The candidate we hired is an entrepreneur--she and her husband started a company he is still running which is their main source of income; she has started another company but needs to refine the product and business plan before it will be successful--and she is more creative and will start other companies in the future, hopefully selling them and being very successful.  Working at Dreamweaver will be front and center for her, and the skills she learns will be applied immediately and directly to her passion in life, which is to start and build companies.

For "Terri," her passion would always be elsewhere, and work would be work.  She has the heart and charisma and talent to do the job, but, after praying about it, I knew that God has greater things in store for her, that Dreamweaver would be a distraction, a resting place while she waited for her dreams to come true elsewhere.

And so, while I didn't choose the name "Dreamweaver," weaving dreams is perhaps the most difficult, seductively subtle task we will do--bringing together people who have different goals, different aspirations, different dreams, and weaving them together into one company where we all cherish our position in the greater whole and are grateful for the rest of the "fabric," for the others around us.

A company can perish for a lot of reasons, one of which is failing at this: because individual threads can tug in different directions, and pursuing their different goals, aspirations and dreams can destroy the fabric, eventually destroying the company.

Always Improve

"Improvements" can take many forms--some are spiritual, some are structural, and some are personal.  But for this guideline, the direction is clear--always improve, whether through good times or bad.  Every success is an opportunity to improve, as is every failure.  (Honestly, the failures may be easier.)

Everyone is special

1. Be a gentleman and a professional at all times.
2. Be the person who deserves the things you want.
3. Never complain or explain.
4. Take credit and responsibility.
5. Everyone is special.
6. Always improve.

This one may be my favorite, though also the most difficult because it requires the most sacrifice and the most humility to execute.

Special:  Christians easily understand that God gave His only begotten son to die for us.  To die for me, actually.  He was on the cross, pierced and bleeding, for me.  It puts me on the same level as God, in a way.  Oh, I'll deny it, but deep down...?  And honestly, am I the only one?  It proves we are special, special in the eyes of God.  It was an amazing act of humility, of love, of sacrifice.  I can get a little humble myself and use words like "broken" and "sinner" because He made a sacrifice for me, and I am grateful--grateful to be that special to Him.  Sometimes we can even get teary eyed in church thinking of Jesus on the cross, suffering for us--for me!  I am special!

I did this for effect.  Keep reading.

Everyone:  Turn it around:  that guy at work who just got your promotion, who is always kissing up and kicking down.  Jesus died for him.  Your neighbor's kid, who walks his dog in your yard and leaves the leavings--he is special.  Your mother-in-law, without whom your relationship with your wife would be perfect--Jesus carried her sins to the cross, and they are forgiven. If not by you, then at least by Him.

Go farther:  that presidential candidate that you didn't vote for and who is ruining our country--Jesus died for him. Our governor--yes, Jesus' sacrifice can even cover that!  Go to WWII, to the SS, the concentration camp workers--Jesus was on the cross loving them, hoping and wishing beyond belief that they will repent and come to Him. Some did, I'm sure.  Their sin is not greater than His sacrifice.

Our attitude toward other people should be that the Lord that we love and submit to came down to die for them, and so how can we do any less than offer ourselves, our life, as a sacrifice to others?  To all others.  There are two kinds of people: Christians and potential Christians.  That's it, and they all deserve our love.  Like the old t-shirt--God gets to "sort them out."  We do not.

How this plays out

Charlie:  I worked at a camp for underprivileged kids while in high school and college.  The camp had very high staff turnover, so eventually I got promoted to Head Counselor.  As such, I was the first to wake and the last to sleep, and I took the worst jobs on camp:  I cleaned and unstopped all the toilets.  I washed the peepee sheets.  I comforted the homesick kids.  And I was the last resort for any behavioral problems.

Charlie was my first, and still my favorite.  He had few friends.  At the opening ceremony, he would sit by himself and heckle.  When reprimanded, you could almost see the satisfaction wash his pimply face--he had gotten our attention, drawn us away from what we were doing, made himself the center of attention.  At lights out, he would throw things at the other campers.  Never anything creative--no traps or tricks--just garden variety rebellion. For my counseling staff, he had the power, through a look, a comment, a hesitation, to destroy their attitude.  Their frustration was palpable, and in a different environment I would have feared for Charlie.  That's why, when their frustration got beyond their willingness to tolerate it, they had the privilege of bringing him to me.  You better believe they enjoyed that!

We weren't allowed to use physical punishment.  We could take privileges, but to Charlie that was victory.  For him and others like him, we used exercise, and I did it alongside them.  I took Charlie to the gym and ran suicides until he stumbled.  We jumped, we pushed, we climbed.  Often, he and I each held a broom out in front of us, arms ruler straight and parallel to the floor.  After 30 seconds, his arms burned.  After a minute, the pain was like a million knives running through his deltoids.  The beauty was, only a little repetition of this exercise would give me enough endurance so there was no pain.  I was immune, but to prove himself, Charlie had to endure it.

Over the years, I had several dozen sessions with Charlie.  We became friends.  I asked him why he did it, why he refused to make friends, to join in, to enjoy, why he chose to be disruptive.  He was a smart kid--he knew what he could do, and he was definitely in control.  He chose his path. 

Eventually, he told me.  He told me about his brothers and sisters, about his mother.  He told me about his father, his neighborhood.  I understood, and our friendship grew--perhaps I was his only friend at camp, maybe his only friend anywhere.  Eventually we made a deal that he could just skip the cutting up and come see me.  As a favor to me he would behave and bring himself to me to be "punished," and we'd sneak off to grab a Coke and some cookies.  It was our little joke.  The other counselors knew, and let him.  And he did.  It was a unconventional, but Charlie was special.

Help:  I once made a sales trip with a senior, seasoned executive who had built a company and sold it for a few tens of millions of dollars.  He brought me to a couple old contacts who he was going to sell on investing in my company--and take a piece for himself, of course.  He bragged how he knew each secretary, their names and how to chat them up, how to use them to get what he wanted.  This one was a gardener, another a single mom. He was imparting this great technique to me, his protoge.

Ack. I could see thier eye rolling as soon as he turned.  He would have been shocked.

I've always thought that a true test of character was how you treated those who could not help you, who you likely would never see again.  Can you be a light for someone's day, knowing there is nothing to gain, no angle to maneuver?  The checkout lady in another town, the person you bumped into, your daughter's ex-boyfriend?

I've been the recipient of this on a number of occasions, and so this is the standard to which I strive: to somehow help each person I contact--to tell them a light story, to give a smile, a squeeze of the shoulder--some measure of support, of love, with no expectation of anything in return--just a gift. Sometimes it is small or quite brief; sometimes it takes dozens of "sessions."

This is it:  "Everyone is special," means just that.  It means that everyone we encounter, every day, no matter how big or small, how important or insignificant, how lasting or brief--Jesus died for every one of them, and I should approach each encounter with the attitude and the goal of making their life a little better, a little brighter, to nudge them a little closer to God--to give them a little something, a little help, a little smile, and to expect nothing in return, because I've already gotten it.


Post Script:  This weekend, a friend of mine died in a mountain biking accident.  He was a fellow CEO of a startup in Greenville, almost exactly my age, and we walked in a few of the same circles.  I didn't know him well, and never spoke with him about his walk with God.  If I were to give myself a grade, based on the above criteria, it would hover between a D and an F.  As I reminisce, it pains me to think of the opportunities that I lost.  This week, I learned that he had been through something recently in which he needed friends, and I was not there--I had not built up the relationship to even be included in those who knew.  It is difficult not to be disappointed--to set such high goals and then fall so short of them.  I am grateful to those of you who have read all the way to this P.S., because going through these guidelines with you has helped to renew them in me, to make them more current, more today and real.  I hope I don't pass up too many of these opportunities going forward.

Never explain or complain.

Continuing the series on my behavior guidelines...here's the list:

1. Be a gentleman and a professional at all times.
2. Be the person who deserves the things you want.
3. Never complain or explain.
4. Take credit and responsibility.
5. Everyone is special.
6. Always improve.

I won't try to separate #3 from #4.  Together, they are my defense against some of the easiest and most socially acceptable ways to compromise your integrity. 

The first guideline brings to mind the old quote:

"It is better to remain silent and appear a fool, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt."

Also Proverbs 17:28:

 ²⁸ Even fools are thought wise when they keep silent;
      with their mouths shut, they seem intelligent.

Picture this explanation, given over a spilled drink:

"Giles was running and he threw the ball, and Ryan jumped to grap it and hit Julie in the chin and she started crying and I dropped my drink when I went to hug her!"

Wouldn't silence, or "I spilled my drink," have been a more honest answer?  The adult version goes something like this:

"We've been using oil to heat this plant for twenty five years, and every time there was a leak near the heating manifold the smoke and smell were so bad we shut down, cleaned up and fixed the leak before anything happened.  This time, the fire came first."

There are any number of others in our adult world. 

"In that situation, no man could resist..."
"How can I be expected to ... when he speaks to me that way?"
"This economy is making everyone pull back--we just did what we had to."
"Of course, it makes sense when that much money is at stake."
"You have to deal with them on their own level..."
"He was waiting behind the hill and just wanted to pull a red sports car..."
"That's the only discipline that works..."
"I did it for her own good..."

Enough.  While actions and results can speak for themselves, we use the accompanying verbiage to deflect attention, but it has the reverse effect of exposing our insecurity, our lack of control and our lack of judgement.  It shows cowardice on behalf of the speaker, and reveals a self-hate and a self-deception that will leave you extraordinarily sad if you dwell on it for even a moment.

It also works with respect to good things.  Consider common responses to "You look beautiful."

"It's the dim lighting," or "It's the dress," or even, "No I don't."

The only proper response to a well-intentioned compliment is "Thank you," and a smile.  Anything else shines a spotlight on our own lack of self-worth.

Complaints cut the same way: 

"He's so domineering." 
"Can you believe they put up with ... behavior?" 
"There isn't a good leader in the whole company." 
"The government is too big/small, and they just won't cut/increase taxes enough!" 
"There's no business out there." 
"I can't take 8 hours of ..."
"Can you believe they dress like that?"
"I hate when they talk about me!"

The inference, in each of these, is that somehow we are above or better than what we are describing, and if only <that> were fixed, then our lives would be so much improved.  There is a reason that the first step to curing alcoholism is to admit that you are an alcoholic--you first have to take responsibility. 

4.  Take credit and responsibility 

I miss my old management team.  We met over lunch every Monday and talked about what had happened, what our plan was and what we were going to do to stay on or get back on track.  When we communicated to the Board, we did so in the form of "Accomplishments" and "Disappointments."

For the accomplishments, we stated the things we had achieved, the parts of the plan that were on or ahead of schedule, the things of which we were proud.  These orders were made and shipped, those patents were issued, this customer made this prototype, this quality level achieved...  We shared credit without deflecting it. When we could, we celebrated what had gone particularly well, especially the individuals that led the effort, all within the context of a team accomplishment.

For the disappointments, it was the same.  What had not gone according to plan, was behind schedule or below target?  We talked about them and how we were going to adapt, what needed to be adjusted.  The heading said it all:  "Here are the things we have not done as well as we would have liked.  It is our responsibility and we accept it."  I tried to make the lists of equal length, though it varied from month to month.  The system framed the conversation and kept the focus on helping the team to do the best that could be done.

I once had a board member who complained, "You never give us any bad news."  I laughed, "I give you a whole page of disappointments at every month!"  In his complaint he was likely describing his own agenda more than our lack of communication.

Lately, since leaving Innegrity, I am often asked what happened, why it is failing.  I don't mind telling the story, but always frame it with, "I was the CEO and was responsible for everything that happened in the company, good and bad."  I then can tell the story in it's entirety, without dodging responsibility, celebrating the accomplishments while giving the disappointments their full air time.  I can talk about what I learned, what I don't yet understand and how I have grown.  People take the story in different ways, and I let the facts speak for themselves.

In the end, my confidence comes because I do not measure my self-worth from financial success, prestige, peoples' opinions of me or other worldly measures.  I stand on much firmer ground, and get my confidence from someone who gave His life for me before I was born because He knew I wouldn't be good enough by any of those measures.  I sometimes see in people's response as I tell this story that they don't understand, that they are bewildered at my ability to speak so frankly, so candidly.  They are amazed that I am so self-confident, so resilient, so determined, so poised.  They think it is something about me, and they couldn't be more wrong. 

It makes me sad to know that they in their own adversity might fall apart or cry, blaming others or outside circumstances and asking the world why it isn't fair, why it had to happen to them, why others had to do this to them, why there is no justice--or in other ways complain, explain or dodge both credit and responsibility.  Were I who I would like to be, I would in those moments be able to explain it to them, be able to help them understand and see from where they should get their strength.  I'm afraid most of the time I fail, and that is quite a disappointment.