I love 37signals** and reference their book all the time. They are masters of the 90% solution. They are masters at what they call “Judo”: minimum effort, maximum return. They have a very small team with a huge philosophical impact based on the reach of their tools (over 1 million users). My dream is to follow this model in education.
We at Swift Kick are still learning Judo. We are in the process of rolling out Red Rover (link will download the .pdf brochure) and are deep into the minute detail debates –
“When a student leader logs in to create a topic post, how many tags can they add to any given post?”
etc. etc. etc.
I called Emma (a Swift Kick employee who focuses on logistics and community) last night to ask her if she would get involved in some of the discussions. I thought her college student leadership experience would really help with some of the prioritization. She paused an awkward amount of time and then came charging out with it:
“Honestly I’m not in the best place to contribute to the project. I’m not all sold on the value of this thing but more importantly, I think we are taking on too much and I think the idea of taking on a huge software development project is insane.”
Emma is wonderfully honest. I love that this is the culture we are building here – honesty is welcome, from everyone. She rattled off all of the things we are doing sub-par. Sales calls, speaking engagement follow-up, the community projects we’ve been talking about for 6 months, she said: “We are a long ways from being good at the core of the business, why would we expand further.”
As one of the leaders of this company, this is an important bit of information. Emma may be the canary in the mineshaft.
I just wrote about doing too much just recently, about how I feel like we are half naked pretending not to notice. Emma is just saying we should fix that first.
I’m clear that we are running hot without the wheels being fully bolted on. I absolutely know that working on Red Rover has cost us sales of speaking gigs.
This is the game of entrepreneurialism. Doing too much is a risk. If our cash flow drops too low, if our quality of service and product drops too low, if we upset customers, damage relationships, or tarnish the brand, all of these things are very bad. This is what Emma is worried about. She wants us to focus on what we have been doing and what we have promised. She’s obviously not wrong to want this.
I see other risks too. The risk that frightens me is doing the standard speaking thing. I’m afraid of complacency and the “norm”. I see the risk of not fulfilling an even bigger promise to have an effect on education.
Red Rover is a good idea, and it will be even better with Emma’s input. It has the potential to be an iPod that seeds the philosophies we teach in institutions across the country.
The trick is finding the window of opportunity between the risk of too much and the risk of not enough.
I’m glad Emma is here to help us find the balance. I’m glad Swift Kick matters enough to her that she is honest.
When I got up this morning, she had made comments on all kinds of things on the Red Rover development boards.
