For Today’s Startup Problem-Solving, Are We Cooking or Baking?

The work of building a startup varies. Sometimes it is more like cooking.  Sometimes it is more like baking. Pick the right mindset for the job at hand.

Entrepreneurial company building is a team sport. Some bring the product and company vision elements. Others bring the execution skills to turn those ideas into reality. Still others handle the back-office processes that keep all the plates spinning. These different roles require different mindsets.

Building a startup sometimes reminds me of making a big Thanksgiving dinner. Inevitably there will be lots of ingredients for diverse recipes prepared by various cooks who are all trying to align their efforts to achieve the vision for the dinner. Each dish will present its own set of challenges. And the whole meal needs to be coordinated to come together in a delicious and timely way.

Baking = Engineering Mindset

Cooking = Business Mindset

Preparing Thanksgiving dinner will require both cooking and baking.  Both are forms of food preparation but demand different skills and mindsets.

• Baking is about combining carefully measured ingredients to achieve precise chemical reactions. Good results depend on meeting demanding requirements spelled out in painstakingly developed recipes. When done well, the resulting cakes, cookies, pies, and loaves of bread are fabulous!
• Cooking is about combining general proportions of ingredients and dynamically seasoning them to taste. Good results depend on experience and flare to achieve a pleasing combination of flavors. When done well, the resulting salads, mashed potatoes, stuffing, turkeys, cranberry relish, and apple sauce are scrumptious!

Like achieving Thanksgiving dinner, building a startup requires different team members solving a diverse array of problems while aligning their skills and solutions in a coordinated and timely way to achieve the vision for the company.  While this analogy is oversimplified to make the point in a blog post, think of the idea this way:

• Engineering Mindset:  Like baking, some of the startup’s problems will require strong engineering skills to accomplish the precise demands of a working technical solution. If not completed to the 100% done level, the solution will often not work at all. 
• Business Mindset:  Like cooking, other startup problems will require casting a vision and cultivating strong relationships using dynamic responses and approximate solutions that are timely and sufficient to meet the need.  Striving for 100% perfection in those cases will often mean wasting excess energy (perfect being the enemy of the good in those cases) and being too slow to capitalize on an opportunity.

Different people have different temperaments, mindsets, and training that bias them towards predominantly using an engineering approach or a business approach to problem-solving.  Both have value. These common differences are one of the reasons you need a team to build a startup. The technical lead and the business lead will compliment each other and will need to cultivate a respectful and robust relationship to navigate the inevitable tensions these different mindsets create.  Remember that it is these different, yet complementary mindsets that often generate the powerful dynamic that leads to startup success.

The key to successfully leveraging these mindsets is to recognize and match the appropriate mindset to the problem at hand – and to realize that sometimes both are needed in sequence.  A classic example is product development. The technical team needs to develop and get the product working sufficiently to meet the customers’ needs. However, their focus on careful follow-through and tying off all the loose ends can lead to a never-completed product.  That is when the adage of “it is time to shoot the engineer and ship the product” comes into play. Often that last bit of judgment about whether the product is good enough comes from letting the business mind override the engineering mind.  I don’t want to imply that a startup should ship a non-working product. However, each mindset takes a different approach and sometimes the trick is finding the perfect balance between them to achieve the startup’s goals.

While many people like and can manage both styles of food preparation, most have a preference for one method or the other.  I think their biases are related to some of the same personality differences that lead individuals to like and excel at different career paths. 

Building a great company will be a team effort because some of the problems will require one mindset, and some will require the other (and a few more varieties in the mix!). The management challenge is in blending and balancing the different mindsets in a way that combines to create a great solution. Therein lies the art of high-potential startup leadership.