Roller Coaster Design and Maintenance
Jim’s wife came at him with an unusual question. Had Jim ever told the night doorman of their apartment building that he was a designer of roller coasters? Sometimes comments take on a life of their own and once they go through the mill they morph in all kinds of interesting ways.
When Jim was in between marriages he had dated a woman who was teaching him Spanish. He immediately stopped the business relationship when the personal one began, but she was a well-known contractor within the company and he wanted to be sure to draw a bright line between his activities. Several months in he had visited an old colleague in another department, who called him after their meeting with a funny bit of news. Some of the junior analyst in the area had asked him if Jim was the well-known senior manager in the company that they thought he was (they had never seen him, but had heard of him). When he affirmed that they asked if it was true that he was sleeping with one of the cleaning ladies. See what happened there? Spanish got translated into cleaning woman. While Jim’s old friend found it all very humorous, Jim was less amused and reminded himself to be more careful about his activities.
When Jim heard about the roller coaster question, he immediately thought about the Fortune Magazine cover art that hung on his office wall. It was a nice piece of artwork that had been a favorite office decoration for several years. He liked what it said about life in the business fast lane. He also liked that old comment from the grandmother in the Steve Martin movie Parenthood when she says, “some people like the merry-go-round, but I like the roller coaster….you get more for you money.” Jim always felt that he too preferred the roller coaster ride to the merry-go-round and that made him the kind of entrepreneur that was willing to step out on a plank and take a risk.
The thing about the roller coaster ride is that because there is risk, you need to manage the process as much as possible to contain the risk. What Jim was doing at the moment was managing a start-up business that was trying to change the world. Like almost everything Jim had ever undertaken in his career, this was the best possible thing he could be working on at this moment in time. That was all well and good, but let’s discuss the design and parameters of the coaster. It needed a viable plan and vision. It needed first rate people. And it needed funding.
Jim had learned years ago that only one of those three elements could truly mitigate risk. A good plan/vision was a perfectly sound aid to point you in the right direction. A pot full of money gave you the time to get things done. But only good people could really make the difference between success and failure. It was the sine qua non of venture capital. Good people could make a mediocre plan that was underfunded work. Less than good people could have all the money in the world and a world class plan and go nowhere fast.
When Jim thought about his particular ride of the moment, he felt that he had inherited, repurposed and assembled a good team. There was no lack of controversy about some of the senior scientific members of the team and Jim was no scientist, but he felt he knew how to gauge people. The tricky part of the equation was that the science they were deploying was way out there and not well-understood by many. This roller coaster deployed some track design that was heretofore untested and based strictly on theory rather than empirical evidence. That’s a scary place to be, but if you’re out to change the world you almost have to be in a scary place by definition. And the real thing was that there was almost no one around who could judge the science any better than he could.
Now then, the trick with a new roller coaster is to be sure you know how to adjust it so that it neither goes too fast or too slow. Too slow and why bother. Too fast and you are off the tracks and beyond hope. Knowing how to calibrate the track and the lubrication to get the ride just right is a key managerial requirement. The essence of roller coaster maintenance is in making sure the wheels are greased properly. In a corporate sense that means that people are properly motivated. Jim had never believed in motivation by fear. The only way to motivate a venture team was by sharing the rewards. When I Jim started this roller coaster, all the rewards were in the hands of Mr. Concept. He had gradually found a path that allowed all of the team to benefit from the success of the ride and that was key.
Jim was unclear about what made him want to be in the roller coaster business. he had used every analogy about pioneers and settlers he could think of. He understood that some people had to walk point and are not happy unless they are out there hanging ten. The world must recognize the issue since there are such an abundance of analogies. But why? Jim would posit the notion that once someone is strapped into a roller coaster and forced to take the ride, the answer becomes self-evident. Once you have looked into the abyss, the abyss doesn’t scare you so much anymore.
Jim sat back and told his wife that he had told the doorman that he was a roller coaster designer. He decided that he would probably get more respect from the doorman if that was the word on the street. There are lots of different kind of roller coasters in life and he was surely on one of them. When he told her that she looked at him funny and said, “But you don’t even like going to Disneyworld?”
Jim just smiled and said, “Disneyworld is for kids. The roller coaster of adventure capital is the real ride of your life.”