Intertech 20 Year Anniversary

On May 31, we’ll be celebrating Intertech’s 20 year anniversary, a record 2011, and our new building.  Customers, partners, and friends are all welcome to attend our open house from 2:00 to 6:00.

Jim White, an Intertech Partner and Java/Open Source expert will be presenting on Groovy.

Andrew Troelsen, an Intertech Partner and Best-Selling author, will be presenting on WinRT/Metro.

I’ll be batting clean-up with a presentation on Building a Winning Business.

To register for the event, just go to http://www.intertech.com/Free-Developer-Training/.  You can attend in-person or live via webcast.

If you can’t make the Open House, you can still see our new facilities here: http://www.go360media.com/intertech/flash/vt_intertech.html

standardMay 9Tom SalonekArticle on Intertech

Act-Learn-Build

What do you call people who are experts at navigating extreme uncertainty while minimizing risk? Serial entrepreneurs is the correct answer according to the authors of Just Start: Take Action, Embrace Uncertainty, Create the Future (see previous post for complete citation).  Serial entrepreneurs don’t start with a predetermined goal in mind. Rather, they allow opportunities to emerge.

“Instead of focusing on optimal returns, they spend more time considering their acceptable loss; instead of searching for perfect solutions, they look for good enough ones,” write authors Leonard A. Schlesinger, Charles F. Kiefer and Paul B. Brown

In other words, serial entrepreneurs act first, learn from those first small steps and then build on the lessons learned. Sometimes the lesson is that it’s not worth going further. Other times it’s clear that opportunity exists and further steps should be taken to maximize it.

An in-depth study of 27 serial entrepreneurs by an associate professor of business administration at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business, Saras D. Sarasvathy, confirmed that “act-learn-build” is a surprisingly effective way to create new products and services.

Here’s how it works in a nutshell, as summarized in the article “New Project? Don’t Analyze—Act” in the March 2012 issue of Harvard Business Review:

Act: Take a small step toward a goal.

Learn: Evaluate the evidence you’ve created.

Build: Repeat steps 1 and 2 until you accomplish your goal, realize you can’t, or opt to change direction on the basis of new information.

“You’re not flying blind, you’re moving forward carefully, eyes wide open. You’re alert to any looming danger—or opportunity,” write authors Schlesinger, Kiefer and Brown.

They go on to note: “We acknowledge that action before analysis can be, well, unpredictable—and messy. And we concede that it’s antithetical to the way most organizations work. However, in the long term, taking lots of small steps actually reduces risk, which makes such an approach ideal for tackling challenges and getting fledgling initiatives off the ground, particularly in today’s skittish corporate environment. And such innovation is critically important not only for companies that want to stay competitive but also for enterprising employees who want to feel fulfilled in their jobs.”

I could not agree more wholeheartedly. In my subsequent posts in this series I will explain how the “Act-Learn-Build” approach has worked in practice at Intertech.

standardMay 1Tom SalonekLeadership

Intertech one of the Best 100 Companies to Work for in 2012 by Minnesota Business magazine

Minnesota Business magazine announced the Best 100 Companies to Work for in 2012.  Intertech made the list for the mid-sized company category.  My thanks to Minnesota Business magazine, our employees, and customers for making this possible.

On June 4, 2012, at an event, the rankings will be announced.

View the post and other winners on the Minnesota Business magazine website

standardApril 26Tom SalonekArticle on Intertech

Getting Things Done. Just Do It!

Nike’s “Just Do It!” may go down in business books as one of the most successful corporate slogans of all times. Americans in particular seem intuitively to understand the simplicity and common sense behind this concise call to action. So why do so many companies have difficulty launching new ventures? Why do so many organizations bog down in “analysis paralysis,” leaving potential moneymaking new revenue ideas behind in the process?

In my book “Building a Winning Business,” takeaway #37 is titled “Just Do It!” In that short chapter I counsel readers that “It’s better to take action than to procrastinate while obsessing about perfection.” I also advise managers not to let things grind to a halt over a single issue. Business writers and educators Leonard A. Schlesinger, Charles F. Kiefer and Paul B. Brown take this advice to a whole new level in their new book, Just Start: Take Action, Embrace Uncertainty, Create the Future (Harvard Business Review Press, March 2012).

Schlesinger is the president of Babson College. Kiefer is the president of Innovation Associates and Brown is a longtime contributor to The New York Times. Together, they have spent years studying how entrepreneurs “create new products, services and business models in situations where the old methods of analyzing, forecasting, modeling, planning, and allocating don’t work.”

Their bottom line: “Successful entrepreneurs don’t just ‘think different,’ they translate that thinking into immediate action, often eschewing or ignoring analysis. Rather than predict the future, they try to create it.”

In the four posts to follow, I will tell you about their findings (see the March 2011 Harvard Business Review for a more in-depth summary of their insightful new book) and share how this same logic has helped Intertech to move ahead in some key areas of our business

standardApril 25Tom SalonekBook Takeaway Post