Engage the world, have a vision, build a city, now go die in it.

Building a company isn't for everyone, and for those who love it, it is an act of sadism. The impetus to build a company is rooted in deep feelings, deep primitive reactions to the world. It is founded on anger, from not fitting in, and from a desire to own your own destiny. It is not a lifestyle or a privilege or an achievement, it is an act of vengeance upon everything that is wrong with society.

Building a company is not the same as making a product. When you make a project, you take an action and you get a response. You put paint on the canvas and it just remains there. It doesn't change. It doesn't talk back. It just sits there until you push it again. As a leader, your job is to create systems for other people to succeed. You must invent systems to hire people, to give them direction, and to help them flourish. You must create systems to help people communicate, to manage each others feelings, and to make progress toward your goal. You must create systems to make them feel considered, to recognize their own visions, and to passionately work toward yours.

But then what happens? You found and inspired people with a codified approach to realize your dream. What does that become? Where does it go? After you build the ship, can you still steer it forward? If there is a challenge ahead, that might keep you grounded, it will make or break you. But what if there is no immediate threat? Where do you go? 

With or without the challenge, you will find a moment of decision, when it is most difficult to remain clear headed and you must persevere. You will find a moment where your previous methods didn't work. You won't working right. You landed the spaceship on the alien landscape and there is no oxygen in place. You try to stick to your gut, or you open you mind, either way you double-down on the direction to see it through. And then you die. There is no air. There was no lifeboat. You were alone and you died alone. 

If along the way you found others who really understand what it is like to drown and resuscitate, then maybe they can give you the right coaching. They can't make oxygen from ether, but maybe they could have told you to prepare and you listened. Maybe they were wrong and you prepared the wrong way. Maybe it all came together and you made it out alive.

Can you make it out alive? All the anger in the world is not enough to save you, and so at some point, the piss and vinegar that gave you fuel to create will ruin you. You must change. What do trap rappers rap about when they become millionaires? Many of them still rap about dealing drugs and fighting gangs. They never cross this chasm. What do great comedians tell jokes about once they told all their personal stories and stories about travel? They need a new act. Many never find one. 

Heidegger said that moments of revelation are when the scrim is pulled back, and you can see the tower on the hill. It was always there, but you could never see it. Heidegger was wrong. The tower is only there if you want it to be, and you don't pull back the scrim, you build the tower. You incentivize others to build it with you and it becomes a city.

Engage the world.

Craft a vision. 

Build a city.

Now go die in it.

True Innovation Makes No Sense Yet Changes Everything

Over the decades I have spent countless hours with executives who seek to bring innovation to their IT systems or their businesses. They say they want dramatic changes. They are 110% convinced that certain technologies can make it possible.  But what they really want is to increase profits, increase efficiency, improve communications, and have greater control over their company.  Those are all good things and quite often, they want proven conventional methods to satisfy many of those needs. Innovation, however, consists of introducing an unknown variable into the mix, so that one cannot entirely predict the outcome. At first, no one likes that idea. 

In the photo above I am soaking pieces of an apple tree and a lemon in a sanitized bucket of distilled water. After a few days I will boil this water and add sugar. I will then filter out the items, cool it down, and bottle it with a chosen yeast to make a hard seltzer, approximately 4.5% ABV and 100 calories. Everything about this process is standard... except the infusion of apple wood and lemon.  I have only a vague idea what this might taste like, based on my experience of smoking meat with apple wood, the smell of the wood, and my familiarity with lemons. Perhaps this infusion won't work at all, it will make zero perceivable difference, or perhaps it will yield a disgusting result.  

To manage the risks, I am only creating one gallon of alcohol. Furthermore, everything I am doing is based on previous experiences and data, with the exception of the wood and fruit. If the outcome is terrible the cost was low. If it is only "a little" terrible, then I can try another version. Maybe apple wood and no lemon? Maybe pieces of oak under pressure - like this Cleveland-based company that uses a similar approach to age bourbon in merely one week?

The process I just described is not innovation. Soaking some wood in the water is somewhat novel, but thats about it. The overall process is more akin to the scientific method as a structured approach to incremental learning. This is one way, the most common way, to manage innovation. The innovation part is leveraging absurdity. Apple wood is a high risk, untested,  and by all means reckless ingredient that is likely to sabotage my brewed product. Have you ever seen an apple wood flavored beer on the shelf? Is this because it is a proven bad concept,  or did no one ever make the leap to try it, then try enough to succeed?  The only insight to hedge the risk, again, is my personal subjective experience with the wood which I used in a smoker, and that isn't very reliable. 

The risk to take a nonsensical action, and to persist in the nonsense, is at the heart of innovation, art, and insanity. The incredible opportunity is the small, yet viable probability that my reckless action will generate massive returns if all goes well. If it doesn't - well, then we could. have trouble. Creating a process to manage innovation is essential to keeping your company afloat by keeping the risks small.  But this still isn't innovation.

Yet what if, somehow, maybe this apple wood seltzer introduces a new idea about beverages. What if it surges in popularity, so much that it will generate an entirely new market of organic wood infused beverages, demanding an increase in new forestry growth and sustainable forestry practices. Maybe this demand will be high enough that it leads to new kinds of job creation,  and inspires other markets that enhance taking care of the earth. Just maybe, I soak some wood in a bucket, and with constant dedication and determination, transform the entire way beverage ingredients are sourced to stimulate new growth in the rain forests and stimulate new economic models.

This is all possible. Before Uber or Lyft, most people would never have jumped into a stranger's car. Before Starbucks, no one in their right mind would have spent seven dollars on a coffee. And before I started brewing beer in my basement, I never thought about the taste of a tree.

When irrational action meets profound vision to inspire a chain of consequences that forever change the lives of people, businesses, and communities – then you truly innovated.  If you are good at it, you don't need a 10 million dollar team of technicians to start, you just need a 5 gallon bucket and a few small logs.