X: I don’t want that.
Y: But let me list the features…
X: No.
Y: More features?
“No” might be the most valuable answer you ever get. It saves you from waste, from false hope, from self-inflicted wounds. The first rule in business is “don’t die”. Survival is easier if you turn away from danger sooner rather than later.
Business school taught me how to think about all of the components of delivering value, not to laser in on the parts that actually mattered. It taught me how to pitch, present a concept, and to argue for my conclusion rather than find the truly best answer out of an ambiguous sea of options. It gave me language, confidence, and competence with tools, but it did not teach me how to use them.
Business school taught me to get other people to “yes” through marketing, finance, and slick presentation skills. It taught me how to apply the logic of money to work flows and how to measure inputs and outputs. It taught me that persuasion drives success (especially if you can throw a financial model at it) and that results come from selling well and hard enough.
In industry, however, I’ve found just the opposite to be true. The most valuable answers have almost all been negative. They’ve been dead ends, negative cash flows, bad feedback, neutral feedback, long lead times, and pointless architecture or excessive business infrastructure. Instead of pitching, now, we listen. We find the ways something will break, and then we try to understand the root cause, instead of bulldozing through with as much muscle as needed to get the job done. We force ourselves re-think the basic question:
“is this on the critical path to delivering customer value?”
Whether up and down the value chain or laterally across your features, that is the only thing that truly matters.
And like art, value is what remains when there’s nothing left to take away.
