Rickerism

I was reading about Josiah Wedgwood last night. Wedgwood industrialized the manufacture of pottery in the last decades of the 18th Century. The author cited a letter in which Wedgwood wrote,

Few hands can be got to paint in the style we want them. I may add, nor any other work we do. We must make them. There is no other way. We have stepped forward beyond the other manufacturers & we must be content to train up hands to suit our purpose.

It was the single largest barrier that Wedgwood faced. It was far easier for Wedgwood to devise the processes of manufacturing pottery than it was for him to find men and women who could execute his processes. Without the hands to execute the processes, Wedgwood could not scale his production.

Execution is the key to success. An idea is like a tuckus; everyone has one. An idea is worthless without the means to execute. Wedgwood needed hands to execute. He could not find the hands that he needed, so created new hands.

With a technology start up, you do not need hands; you need brains. If you are a start up in a brand new technology, you are going to face the exact same challenge as Wedgwood. There will not be enough brains to execute your plan. There will not be enough people who know and understand the new technology. Your solution will have to be the same as Wedgwood. You will have to make your own brains.

In order to be successful with a brand new technology, you will have to build your own brain factory.

A brain factory is a repeatable, replicable process for recruiting competent people and training them in a particular technology. I rarely see start ups consciously build brain factories. They create the new brains, necessity demands it, but they do so inadvertently, ad hoc, without any sense of the efficiency of manufacturing. It is one of the reasons why first movers fail. They end up building the brains that supply their competitors.

In 1998, Drew Munro and I built a brain factory at XMLSolutions Corp. It is hard to believe now, but at that time few people knew or understood Extensible Markup Language (XML). The brain factory consisted of the following elements:

• Classes in XML that provided the same training to our employees that we provided our customers
• Book series with Charles Goldfarb, a founder of markup languages
• Formal mentoring program for employees, matching senior staff with junior staff
• Apprentice staffing plan for professional services engagements that mixed new consultants with experienced consultants
• XML certification program created with IBM

The brain factory was a part of the XMLSolutions strategic business plan. It was not complicated or even sophisticated, but it was deliberate. XMLSolutions grew from 6 to 160 people in 18 months. Our brain factory made that possible.

The best brain factory on earth is the United States Army. The US cannot hire men who are physically fit, disciplined, exceedingly lethal and loyal to the principles of the Constitution. Such men must be made. Lieutenant General Robert M. Elton was the Deputy Chief of Staff for Personnel (DCSPER) for the US Army in the 1980s. He’s the guy that gave us the “Be all that you can be” campaign. In 1993, I had the privilege to help General Elton build a brain factory. It was called TARDEC University. It was a critical part of the effort by Dr. Kenneth J. Oscar and Richard E. Minnis to reinvent the Army’s tank laboratory at Detroit Arsenal. That effort transformed TARDEC and its 1,300 employees from the worst laboratory in the US Department of Defense to be recognized as the best organization in the federal government (President’s Quality Award).

See:

Niel McKendrick, “Josiah Wedgwood and Factory Discipline” in The Rise of Capitalism, ed. David Landes (Macmillan: 1966) pp65-81.