Beware of Glittering Generalities

While “glittering generalities” can serve to cast a vision or set a direction, because they lack a sufficient definition of how you will accomplish the goal, they are not actionable plans for building and operating a business in and of themselves. It is critical for the team to work through the operational tradeoffs and details.

“Glittering generalities” are abstract statements that provide a general direction or a philosophical intent but lack critical specifics on realizing the goal. Often glittering generalities are easy-to-aspire-to, generally true things that would be typical for many to want to achieve. For example:

• Let’s build a startup unicorn!
• Dealing with tech debt is important.
• Direct sales teams are the standard and best answer.

As a big, abstract articulation of where you are trying to go, these broad sweeping statements can be helpful when casting an aspirational vision or direction. However, they are too simplistic for actually operating a business, except perhaps as a starting point for figuring out how to solve the matrix of interconnected problems in front of you. But to accomplish the task at hand, you must determine how you will achieve that via specific strategies, tactics, designs, and budgets. These choices are the bets you make on how to realize the abstraction embodied in the glittering generality. Let’s walk through the example statements above as illustrations for thinking about what it means to break a glittering generality down into the executable building blocks and actionable plans of an actual startup success story:

• “Let’s build a startup unicorn!” the CEO declared. Wanting a $1B+ valuation is an aspirational, glittering generality statement. Of course, it sounds great in concept. Wouldn’t we all like a $1B valuation? But now the real work begins. How are you going to do it? Precisely what will you do to earn a $1B valuation? Have you identified a sufficiently painful customer-recognized unmet need? A novel way to meet it? A capital-efficient way to build it? A workable path to getting it adopted? A pricing strategy that balances the customers’ needs for value and return on investment with the startup’s need for a sustainable business model? The funding required to build and commercialize the product? Fundamentally, what exactly is the plan, and how will you go about executing it?

• “Dealing with tech debt is important,” the CTO intoned. From a technical perspective, accumulating technical debt (tech debt), the implied cost of additional rework caused by choosing an easier technical solution now instead of using a better approach that would take longer, is a natural consequence of development. Analogous to monetary debt, if technical debt is not repaid (upgraded to better solutions over time), it can accumulate “interest,” making it harder to implement changes and extend the software design. As an idea, the concept of dealing with “tech debt” is abstract and non-specific. The problem with the CTO’s statement is not that it is not true but that it is not actionable. Specifically, what prior technical designs should be reworked? Is that tech debt blocking some new feature we want to develop? What resources are required to rework that particular tech debt, and how does investing in that action open up future development pathways? What risks are we taking by opening up the currently working solution to improve it? Do the likely benefits outweigh the risks? The reality is that tech debt does need to be dealt with, or it can ultimately doom the whole system. However, often, business sponsors do not want to be told that they need to spend resources reworking something, even though this is inherent in iterative software development and often is a technique used to de-risk software solutions. The problem is the CTO’s glittering generality statement was not followed up with any actionable recommendations. There was no specificity or particular ask, such as: “We would like to invest a couple of weeks of the development team’s time in reworking our XYZ widget implementation to improve its performance and remove the following ABC limitations. This investment will delay delivery of the new feature you requested until next month.” Now, instead of asking me for an unbounded authorization or blank check, we had the results of translating the abstract idea/principle of tech debt remediation into an actionable and approvable plan that made the tradeoffs clear.
   
• “Direct sales teams are the standard and best answer,” the VP of Marketing told everyone who would listen. Out of the blue, he seemed to have developed an axe to grind that was disconnected from the company’s nuanced circumstances. We had a channel strategy that was both capital efficient and starting to generate results that he had been involved in developing. He had advocated strongly for not investing in a direct sales force too soon – and we had not yet hit the milestones we had determined would trigger such an investment. Now he changed his tune to “We need to build up our direct sales force because that is how everyone does it.” But, while it was a commonly pursued strategy which I certainly had also used before, this glittering generality assertion did not address many essential “devil is in the details” questions required to decide to change our strategy. Did we have the prerequisites to position an expensive sales force for success? Did we have referenceable pilot accounts we could point to who had successfully deployed our solution? Had we identified the target buyer and what story would resonate for them? Which market segment and buyer was most likely to purchase what we currently had to sell? Were the selling story elements sufficiently mature to move beyond the earliest visionary adopters? Did we have collateral materials and supporting tools and processes to enable a scaled-up sales force to succeed? How big of a sales force was needed to hit our emerging goals? Did we have the resources in the bank to fund a scaled-up sales force for at least the likely length of the sales cycle if we made this big bet now, or were we going to set ourselves up to fail by hiring big and then running out of money before we had given the new strategy time to payoff?

A statement of a generalized concept is often an abstractly good goal, but it is not an actual plan. To become a plan, the entire web of constraints, specific challenges, stage of development, and available resources must be considered. So, beware of glittering generalities when someone lofts them at you as a startup leader. As statements of general intention, they often come from people who have not been wrestling with the specifics of your business challenges and can be dangerously simplistic. They may or may not fit your situation. Challenge yourself and your team to go beyond the glittering generality and do the work to test your assumptions, wrestle with the “how” details and tradeoffs, and reduce the general concept to actionable practice.