What mistakes could I make here?

The current reading for my class this week is about experts, errors and blending intuition and analysis. One of my favorite passages was a quote from Buckminster Fuller – “If I ran a school, I’d give the top grades to those who made a lot of mistakes and told me about them, and then told me what they learned from them.” The chapters speak to the value of lessons learned when making mistakes and establishing mental models to expand their tacit knowledge (see last week’s article) to complement the known explicit knowledge.

As I think through my career journey, I’ll highlight a mistake I made at each stop along the way and what lesson I learned each time. Certainly, I’ve made many more mistakes in my life than just these – I just wanted to share at least one from various stops along my path and the lesson learned from each one.

Dundee-Crown High School

I played many sports growing up – golf, baseball, basketball, cross country, track, football, soccer, etc. I might have had a chance to play baseball beyond high school, but I was more focused on playing basketball for fun (DURING baseball season) with my friends rather than put in the time to improve my baseball skills. I was a “natural” baseball player and earned honors as an “All Conference” player in my senior year. I’m not looking back at my life wondering whether I could have made it to the major leagues. But I had the passion and interest in baseball and didn’t fully apply myself at the time. My lesson learned is to focus more deliberately on what it takes to continuously improve versus just settling for “pretty good”. 

University of Illinois

My first two years at U of I was all about enjoying time with new friends, playing sports every weekend and creating excuses for NOT going to classes. My grades suffered. I realized I needed to put school first while still finding time to enjoy everything else. Lesson learned? I discovered the right life balance of attending classes and studying appropriately while still having fun with friends. My grades went up significantly and I graduated with a GPA solid enough to earn my first job at…

IBM

I’m grateful for the two Managers I worked with at IBM. My hiring Manager saw enough in me to hire a kid with a degree in Ceramic Engineering and give him an opportunity in sales with the largest (at the time) computer company in the world. And that was after telling him I dropped my pursuit of a degree in Computer Science because I “didn’t like computers or programming” – maybe not the best thing to say with IBM. My mistake in sales was to try to act as if all of my customers should become my friends. My second Manager gave me some excellent advice about the pros/cons of being friends with my customers. My lesson learned was to stress the importance of building a strong relationship with my customers first based upon mutual business success. Then, over time, learn to build a relationship beyond that initial business success that encompasses a great mix of both work and personal relationship development.

InterTrans Logistics/i2 Technologies

After my days in the world of IBM, I took a job with a small software company called InterTrans Logistics as a part of our (personal) move to Seattle (from Chicago). We established a strong partnership with a company called i2 Technologies – who eventually purchased us. During the partnership, I earned a reputation for being one of the “best” salespeople with InterTrans and was offered an opportunity to be the West Coast Sales Manager. I quickly learned that I didn’t know how to manage other reps, especially when their skill sets were dramatically different than my own. Two or three of my reps thrived as we worked together as peers. But I didn’t know how to manage the others and attempted to apply what always worked for me to them. My lesson learned is to understand each individual uniquely, listen closely to what’s important to them (versus what I know worked for me) and help them to leverage their strengths and shore up their opportunities for growth.

eCash Technologies

I’m grateful the original founders of InterTrans Logistics hired me as employee #1 in their new startup called eCash Technologies. Like many companies who imploded during the “dot com crash” of the early 2000’s, we felt as if our (single digit) millions of revenues justified an evaluation of hundreds (if not more) of millions of dollars in value. I remember standing in the parking lot of Swatch (just outside of Zurich) with the founder of our company. We just had an amazing meeting with the Swatch executive team and felt as if we were positioned for a HUGE deal that would transform our company. At the time, one company was offering to purchase us for more than 100x our annual revenues. The times were very crazy. We were so excited we stated we wouldn’t sell the company unless the price was in the billions. Lesson learned? Sign the contract first BEFORE making any other business decisions or commitments assuming the deal is done (also known as “don’t count your chickens until they are hatched"). The dot com crash began shortly after our trip home from Switzerland and we never secured the original deal as discussed that day in Zurich.

Parametric Technology Corporation (PTC)

Though I was the lead for a complex program we were working with Boeing, I was part of a great team who supported Boeing across multiple locations. And our team was part of a larger Aerospace & Defense business unit inside of PTC. There were many times that my specific executive sponsor wanted to move quickly on something. And I usually reacted immediately to support his needs for that one program versus seeking to understand how other solutions across the fuller Boeing team level, or even the entire A&D vertical, might have been better for Boeing and for PTC. I’m reminded of an African proverb someone shared with me recently – “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far and reach your destination effectively, go together”. My lessons learned were to stop trying to be the “hero” alone and, instead, collaborate with others towards a better result.

Oracle

When I moved to Oracle, I focused on a solution set focused on helping customers with their Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) needs. Though many customers and potential prospects were in the Aerospace & Defense (A&D) industry, there were many more opportunities across many other industries where PLM also offered a tremendous value proposition. Initially, most of my stories were about the value proposition of PLM in the A&D industry. While those discussions established some credibility for me, they clearly didn’t address the industry-specific needs of other customers. My lesson learned was to focus more deeply both on the industry trends of an organization as well as their specific company needs. Only then would I be in a position to present a compelling solution to new potential customers.

Pariveda Solutions

Within my first few months at Pariveda, I secured a partnership with a new client we had never done business with. The contract ran for a full year to build a custom solution to address their numerous business requirements. My big miss here was a lack of change management and an ineffective way of setting expectations. As the scope changed by 20-25% during the course of the year, I failed to effectively reset the customer’s expectations that we couldn’t address 100% of the original scope for the same amount of money while adding an extra 20-25% of scope over time. My lessons learned here are to over communicate with your customer and to constantly reset and manage expectations as changes occur during a long project.

Consider how to create a safe environment for yourself and others where making mistakes leads to excellent lessons learned. Surely, I’ve made a ton of mistakes in both my professional and personal lives. But we are each the compilation of the lessons learned coming out of the mistakes we make over the journey of life. This is what enables us to build up experience and apply it to future endeavors.

And what about my drive on the 18th hole? I considered how many times I tried to crush a drive on the last hole of the day. Or to see how much farther I could drive it from an elevated tee. And I quickly sorted through the hundreds of mistakes I've made on the tee box. But I thought about how many successful drives I had when I was calm and poised. I simply focused on making a safe shot – which I did. My calmness carried over to my next shot and I landed the ball about fifteen feet from the hold. Given my MANY lessons learned with bad putts, I took my time, focused myself and made the nice birdie putt.