Aviation of Business

posted by Andrew Hartley - Business Consultant & Entrepreneur on Mar 17

My wife and her father often play Dr. Mario, an old eight-bit Nintendo game.  In this game, each player starts with a number of “germs,” each one of three colors: blue, red, or yellow.  The goal of the game is to eliminate all of the germs from the screen.  To do so, you must either stack up (vertically) or line up (horizontally) four blocks of the same color.  The blocks are actually pills; some are all one color - most are half one color and half another.  They come in any combination of two of the colors above.  Players can move and flip the “pills” to get them lined up or stacked properly to eliminate the colored germs with same color pill (or half-pill).  The pill’s and germs disappear when four or more of one color are lined (or stacked) up.

What is interesting about this is that when playing in competition, it is possible to “plop” on the other player by arranging your pills so as to make more than one line disappear with one move.  The other player will have two (or three, or four!) “half-pills” drop down at random on his/her side of the screen.  These plops generally land in inconvenient places and are inconvenient colors.

Why the hell am I giving you a crash course in Dr. Mario, you ask?  For this reason:  The competitive style of playing the game is uncanny in its parallel to entrepreneurship and business.  Stay with me here…

 Business is competitive by its very nature.  So the competition aspect of Dr. Mario draws an obvious similarity; however, there is much more!  Due to competition in business, there are constant “plops” in your business from your competitors… these “plops” are neither convenient nor avoidable - they happen no matter what you do.  They are totally in the control of your competition.

Now it gets truly interesting.  What you do and how you react to these “plops” often determins your success in the game… just like in business and entrepreneurship.  If the “plops” distract you from your ultimate goal of eliminating germs, your competition will beat you in short order.  On the same token, if you ignore the plops and play as if they aren’t happening, you’ll also get beaten.  To win the game, you have to change your actions to take the plops into account while always keeping the germs in mind.  If you can eliminate the germs while dealing with the plops, you have a good chance of winning.  By the way - sometimes the plops are actually beneficial.  Just like in life, luck plays a role.

My wife consistently wins at the game… often she wins three rounds straight - “skunking” her opponent.  She also regularly comes from behind after being ruthlessly “plopped” upon.  She is a master of adjusting her actions and strategy based on the reality of the game - always focusing on the end goal of eliminating the germs.

We need to do the same in business - focus on our goal, but always see the reality of our situation.  Only a combination of the two will lead us to success so we can “skunk” our competition.

Fair Winds,
Andrew

posted by Andrew Hartley - Business Consultant & Entrepreneur on Mar 11

Let’s start the aviation/business metaphor at the beginning - design.

I was recently in Memphis to facilitate some software training, and my flights back home were VERY delayed due to weather.  I was supposed to depart Memphis at 3:50 in the afternoon, but didn’t actually depart until about 7:30 in the evening.  That’s nothing compared to the JetBlue delays several weeks ago (and I was, fortunately, in the terminal and not on the plane for those few hours!), but it is still draining to sit around in uncomfortable airport seats while waiting for your aircraft to arrive. 

Luckily for me, my crew (two pilots and a flight attendant) were ALSO waiting for the plane to arrive, so I used the time to speak with them about flight schools (I’m considering going back to school and flying professionally while I build my businesses) and aviation in general.  See my Intro to Networking post for my take on meeting new people and networking in general.  I was also quite fortunate that my crew from Memphis to Chicago was ALSO the crew flying me from Chicago home - as long as I didn’t let them out of my sight, there was no way for me to miss my connection!  Mada, my flight attendant, also moved me from my cramped little seat to a leg-roomy exit row seat (another example of why you should network every chance you get)!

Once on the ground in Chicago, there were more than 60 people waiting to get on a 40-seat airplane (an Embraer Regional Jet, if you’re interested).  The weather was still ugly, but we boarded the airplane and pushed back with several empty seats.  A few of the other passengers grumbled in anger about leaving people behind when there was obviously room on the airplane - so I tried to explain to those in earshot about how aircraft are not designed to carry both full passengers AND full fuel… every kind of aircraft has weight limitations - and passengers add weight.  Fuel adds weight, too.  And if the plane is too heavy, it won’t fly.  So when you’re flying through (or into, or around) bad weather, it is necessary to carry more fuel (not only for safety but also to meet certain regulatory requirements) in case Air Traffic Control makes you hold or if you have to go to an alternate airport because of the conditions at the planned destination.  To carry this fuel, the airline may have to leave some seats empty. 

Now, it is possible (theoretically) to design an airplane that creates enough lift at a slow enough speed to fly with full fuel and full passengers - but it would most likely burn fuel at a faster rate and/or have to fly at a slower speed, meaning its range would be unacceptable for use as an airliner or the flight would take longer than acceptable to us as passengers.  So the designers of the plane have to trade utility for efficiency and efficacy. 

All of the above leads me to what really struck me about the similarities of tradeoffs between the design of an airplane and the design of a new business:  in both airplane design and business design, you can’t be everything to everyone… you need to find a niche.  Many, many business and entrepreneurial bloggers have already spoken about this from a business perspective, including (but obviously not limited to) Derek Gehl, of The Candid Internet Marketer; Sterling and Jay of Internet Business Mastery; and Tyler Cruz, of An Internet Entrepreneur’s Journey, who doesn’t actually say anything at all about how to find one or really even what one is, but waxes eloquently about how, exactly, one pronounces it. 

In business, because an entrepreneur wants a business to be low-cost and bring in enough money to make a profit, s/he cannot make everyone happy.  Choices have to be made about what products to sell and at what price, and where to locate.  An entrepreneur who designs a business so they can “fill all the seats and still put in full fuel” to try to please everyone will find themselves not pleasing anyone. 

So in business, you must find a niche, then create a product around it - even though there are many stories of entrepreneurs creating a product, then creating a niche for it after the fact (this is lovingly known as “an answer in search of a problem”), this is by far the exception rather than the rule.  The airplane, actually, is a good example of this; Orville and Wilbur Wright designed the first airplane - The Wright Flyer - for the sheer challenge, not because there was demand for flying machines.  They then set out to build demand for the product.

An airplane’s design allows its pilots to understand what they can make it safely do.  In a similar manner, every successful business is designed with a focus, allowing its “pilots” to sacrifice less important things (according to the business’s design) to meet the goals that it has set for itself.  A business’s mission, vision, and values state its purpose - as well as what it is willing to “trade” to achieve its goals.

posted by Andrew Hartley - Business Consultant & Entrepreneur on Mar 3

Okay, so the more I read blogs, the more I am amazed at the similarities between people. 

Verna Wilder, for instance, consistently impresses me with the similarities between what she does (or wants to do) and what I do (or want to do).  Recently, Verna posted about wanting to learn to play the harmonica.  In her usual manner, she wrote beautifully about the lesson that particular interest was currently teaching her: to really learn something, you must first learn to have a Beginner’s mind.  I’ve long wanted to learn to play piano, guitar, etc., but I have trouble starting something that I don’t already understand or basically know how to do already.  It’s silly, but difficult for many people, I imagine.

Another thing I’ve noticed is that as soon as you start something, the universe provides to make it work (as long as you really want it)!  Within a month of starting this blog, another blogger posts about flying!  Ben Casnocha, a blogger, entrepreneur, and passionate player of table tennis, recently took his first flight in a small aircraft.  Apparently, a friend of his owns what appears from the picture to be a Cirrus airplane and he was taken on a flight over Colorado.  I’d accuse him of trying to elbow into my metaphor, but I’m sure he doesn’t know who I am, nor does he need my traffic. :)  I have two questions for him, though:

1. Did you think about the similarities between flying that plane and starting/running a business?
2. Where have you heard about the “unusually high rate of small aircraft accidents?”

So it’s a small world; people separated by hundreds, even thousands of miles - people who have never even met each other - are connected in strange, interesting ways.  Verna has reminded me that to learn and do something new, you have to start by accepting that you aren’t going to be good at it at first, and that’s okay.  And Ben has reminded me that one of the main goals of this blog is to build a metaphor connecting aviation and business-building - and I have yet to truly post on that topic.  Watch for that post soon!

Thanks, Verna.

Thanks, Ben.

Thanks, readers - for your comments!  Keep ‘em coming… have you noticed the connections between strangers and essentially disparate people?  How did the connections become obvious to you?