This is an assignment of a Entrepreneur class I’m currently taking in college. Read The Innovator’s DNA: Mastering the Five Skills. Pick out the most important discovery skills that you think are relavant to you. Use concrete examples to illustrate your points. Fit all your points, examples into 2 A4-pages.
This is a good change to update my dusty blog page. I hope you enjoy it.
Questioning
Questioning is about posing good questions.
- I distinctly remember one CM101 class I took in my freshman year. We were bouncing between different topics. While we were discussing Game Theory, to illustrate an example, Prof. Vu Duong posed a problem “How to solve traffic jams in HCMC ?”. He started to pose dozens of questions: “What if … ? , why … ?”. Since traffic in HCMC seems very chaotic, the number of constraints for this particular problem is incredibly massive. Here, the ability to ask questions to draw patterns and eliminate/pose constraints is crucial.
- I once had a chance to sit in a seminar of Trang Le and her husband - Sonny Vu - the founder of Misfit Wearables (a super successful company which was acquired by Fossil). One of the three skills that Sonny encourages young people to work on is: the ability to ask great questions. He claimed at the seminar that very good questions can lead the team to go the right way. I watched a video of him introducing the Shine - the flagship product of Mitsfit. The mission of Misfit is to help customers become healthier. The Shine is a simple answer to a simple question “Are you moving enough ?” embracing the idea of simplicity and elegance into whatever Misfit . The Shine measures your bike pedals and sensing your movements, it does all of those with the size of a penny. Anyway, he also said this is a hard skill to acquire.
- I have one story that matches the theme of not being looked stupid when asking questions. The former NASA administrator Charles Bolden always has 2 rules whenever he gave a speech, especially talking to students. Those are “You can ask questions anytime” and “There are no dumb questions”. I guess Bolden’s intention is to build courage in students to ask questions because he thinks that it is a great habit. Bolden has a very interesting personal story about how he became an astronaut. Briefly, he never thinks of going into space until the age of 33 because of some personal reasons. After a conversation with a friend who always wanted to be an astraunaut, he “got his pen and paper” and apply for the space program. He claimed the he made a mistake of limitting himself when not give him a chance to apply for the program. I believe that by being having the guts of asking questions and along with a set of other must-have skills lead him with a tremendous job later. He was the administrator of the famous NASA, giving the freedom to students to ask any questions anytime sounds very strange to me for the first time. I wasn’t brought up with this this kind of thinking, I find this point very interesting and inspiring.
Networking
The idea of networking is to get many people in different fields together to finetune one’s ideas. In early words, the author gives some concrete examples that many companies happened to make businesses work amazingly well by having different people come from different backgrounds. I firmly believe that great things can only be achieved by a talented, connected group of people and normally under the leadership of a great leader.
- Bill Gates shared that he enjoyed working with really smart people. Picking people is one of his best business decisions and insisted the decision to go into partnership with Paul Allen and Steve Ballmer is at the top of the list. He personally has a set of people to ask for advice about whatever topic when he needs one.
- My hero in technology is the Uber CTO, Thuan Pham, who was able to scale the engineering team from 40 people to 2000 engineers and made the company being resilient over the hypergrowth years . He joined Uber in 2013 as the head of engineering after 5 other companies over his career. In 2013, Uber was an unknown company, it is only known in the cities that it operated in. He was facing a challenge building the engineering team step by step. He could not immediately hire world-class talents because those folks are very well-compensated and situated in other big tech companies. He started reaching out to his colleagues and his “personal networking group” and successfully gathered a group of really great talents to join the company . “They joined Uber because they trust me, they trust my judgements“and “dozens of them joined actually”, there were people who had worked with him in one of the last five companies. Once he asked to help him do something, they were ready to drop whatever they are doing and join the company.
- On the other hand, networking for me is not a skill that is just essential for one’s career. I believe that one who has a group of meaningful relationships professionally definitely has a fulfilling social life. The story of Pham who has a network that if he needs anyone that has a skill set fits a position, he will reach out to them and “they will drop whatever they are doing and join the company because they trust me” really intrigues me. And of course, people don’t believe him for fun, he has definitely been diligent, disciplined, helpful and trustful over his career. I cannot think of a better way to spend a person’s lifetime.
Associating
This skill is about bouncing between different ideas, putting solutions that worked in one discipline and apply to another discipline.
- One clear example that pops to me right away is as I am growing up, solutions of Chemistry, Physics and solving coding problems usually borrow ideas from Maths, “treat this as X apply method Y on X”. I remember there were times when teachers gave me a single hint sentence and I would be able to solve the problem easily. At college, the scope is bigger. Now, to spark good ideas, you need to have to be reasonably good-exposed to different disciplines. As the book said, the practices of zoom in and out, changing different viewpoints seeing the problem are incredibly crucial.
- Dr. Franzika Bell, Director of Data Science at Uber holds a PhD in Theoretical Chemistry from UC Berkeley. When asked how it was like to switch from academics to a technology company, she stated: “It didn’t actually seem like much of a jump”, She developed models to applied to enzymatic reactions, these models all boil down to some mathematics description so although “these methodologies have very different names when you go into the machine learning world, but the underlying mathematics are very similar, sometimes even identical”. Here, the abilities to zoom in and out incorporated with her skills in Chemistry really help her do a great job at Uber and even was promoted as a Director of Data Science after just 4 years joining the company.
What are the other two discovery skills? You might ask. They are experimenting and observing. I don’t think I have enough experience and read enough examples to illustrate these points. I hope I can write about these two sometime in the future.
References
Dong tien thong minh FNBC
Q&A session with Thuan Pham - RISE Conference 2019
Data Science at Scale - A conversation with Uber’s Fran Bell
Charles Bolden - Exploration and the Journey to Mars