One of my favorite restaurants is the Thai Chili Gardens, a local place not far from where I work. Every time I go, the food is excellent. Every restaurant owner knows (or they will soon discover) that customers expect dishes to taste good, and taste pretty much the same each time they come in. Even subtle changes in the way a meal is prepared or which ingredients are used can turn off customers who will never come back.
The typical startup business plan goes something like this:
- Come up with a cool product.
- Make the product as quickly as possible.
- Show everyone how cool the product is.
- Watch as everyone begs you to take their money.
- Buy a {:porsche, :z4, :slr_mclaren, :tesla_roadster}.select { |car| is_favorite?(car) }
Statistics show that most businesses fail within the first 5 years. Very few live on, and fewer still turn into major cash machines like Google or Microsoft. The trouble is, once your business finally “makes it”, your original business plan (see above) suddenly seems absolutely brilliant! You’re a certified genius! Somehow you totally miss the fact that what just happened was a product of pure dumb luck.
This happens over and over again in real life. Someone reads a couple of Paul Graham’s startup essays and gets excited about starting their own business. So they create a quick business plan in their mind (see above), and start coding. If they are lucky, they succeed (and may even get rich) with their idea. Then they spend the rest of their lives trying to do it again. Usually, they can’t.
Why?
Creating consistently successful products is hard for the same reason that most businesses don’t last more than 5 years. It also happens to be the primary reason people pay a lot more to eat food prepared by a chef than by a local high school student. Let’s have a look at how chefs, and my favorite restaurant, keep people coming back for more.
What’s so great about a good chef? Why are people like Tom Colicchi so successful? With or without a recipe, a good chef is somehow able to consistently deliver a great culinary experience. How do they do it? If you want to be consistently great, there is simply no room for pure dumb luck. This is what I call the Chef’s Dilemma.
The Chef’s Dilemma is to be consistently great, even when faced with situations they have never seen before. The solution is simply this: principles. Steven Covey defines a principle
So this is where people get into trouble: They think that if they just try hard enough, or dream big enough, or believe hard enough, they will be successful. As a young boy, a friend of mine thought that a store-bought Superman cape would let him fly off the balcony of his house. He stood outside with his best friend looking down on the yard. His friend had made a cape from a towel, since he wasn’t lucky enough to own the real thing. The home-made Superman jumped first, and discovered the true principle of gravity. My friend was not worried however, because his friend didn’t have the “real thing.” So then he jumped.
Principles are in control, not people. If you want to be consistently successful, you must discover and build on true principles. Then the principles will work in your favor, rather than against you. Principles work at a deeper level, and are therefore far more powerful than any recipe, formula, or process.
If I want to be a great chef, I must study hard, cook thousands of dishes, and master the principles of cooking. I need to understand how ingredients interact with each other, why certain techniques work better than others, and why pleasant-looking meals taste better. A chef who can consistently create great meals and handle unforeseen challenges understands much, much more than how to simply follow a recipe. They understand at a very basic level what it takes to make great food, no matter what’s for dinner.
So if you want your business to succeed, and you want to consistently turn out great products, you must do what the great chefs do. You must seek out and master the basic principles that go into business management, design, project management, or whatever else you are involved in. Educate yourself. Seek out successful people and ask them how they did it. They probably won’t talk about principles, but they will give you clues to the underlying principles at play.
If you follow this path, over time you will learn to recognize the true principles that drive success. That hot, crusty bread at your favorite Italian restaurant doesn’t taste good just because you want it to, or just because someone worked really hard baking it. It melts in your mouth not because the baker just happened to get lucky, but because someone, somewhere understood at a very deep level the principles of baking.
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P.S. – Check out John Deere or 37signals to see principle-based companies in action.
New! See our recommended reading list for principle-based engineering.
