La Professionale

The amount of resources, time and money that go into solving a small problem is pretty comparable to the amount of resources that go into solving a big problem.

Why not solve a large problem?

-Randy Komisar, General Partner, Kleiner-Perkins

Every morning I take the bus up 3rd Avenue to the David Eccles School of Business. A colleague and I get on the first bus that comes out of SL Central Station: 5:55 am and stroll into the student-run Template Cafe at the school of business to manage the coffee service.

The nice thing about taking the bus is that it, in large part, adds some structure to my life. I have to wake up at 5am every weekday, which means that I have to go to be no later than 10pm, which means that I have to be on task with everything. Overall, more is getting done because I sleep in no later than 7am on weekends and waking up early is getting easier and easier.

Of course, there are some frustrations and variability dealing with late busses but it's not unmanageable.

Anyone who has taken public transportation semi-regularly knows that after a while it becomes routinized because you've experienced it enough to account for any event that occurs within two standard deviations of what "normally" happens.

And then there is the people who take the same routes that you do. Though you never actually talk to them, you get to know them by being around them in the context of taking a bus. These are what I call 'perfect strangers'. They know a certain aspect about you that few others in your life do simply because the experience of taking public transportation imparts a certain discipline.

One such perfect stranger fascinates me in particular. My colleague and I have aptly named him 'La Professionale'. La Professionale is a gentleman who stands about 50m away from the bus stop, down on the corner of South Temple and E St. smoking his cigarette and watching for the bus to come down the street. He does this because the bus stop is in poor line of sight for the approaching bus and makes it difficult to maximize the full potential of a cigarette when waiting for the bus to come. it's evident that this method was discovered and born out of a long period of trial and error wasting cigarettes waiting for the bus.

We call him 'La Professionale' because he has taken a simple task like waiting for the bus, maximized it's potential utility (keeping yourself entertained during the 'standard 7 minute waiting for the bus window' by smoking a cigarette) and optimized the process to be repeatable every time it happens.

What's professional about it is that he has found the activity that delivers the highest possible value for him and has made it trivial. He just does it, no thinking, no effort.

Entrepreneurs, myself included (especially), could take a lesson from La Professionale in regards to building their companies. A recent lecture I heard by Dr. Robert Wuebker is that entrepreneurship is about business discovery, not business planning. In the process of developing the potential of an idea, there is a lot of trial and error until you find out which configuration works: wide customer acceptance/satisfaction, high profit.

What determines whether or not the business has long term success is a function of the entrepreneur's ability to get that configuration to run, generate repeatable results and do so automatically.

Like La Professionale