Sacred Cow
“one that is often unreasonably immune from criticism or opposition.”
“Mirror”
Lil Wayne
Uh, With everything happening today
You don't know whether you're coming or going
But you think that you're on your way
life lined up on the mirror, don't blow it (Whoo!)
Look at me when I'm talking to you
You lookin' at me, but I'm lookin' through you
I see the blood in your eyes
I see the love in disguise
I see the pain hidden in your pride
I see you're not satisfied
And I don't see nobody else
I see myself
I learned a long time ago from one of my commanding officer's, (now an Admiral), when I worked for him as a SEAL that when faced with a critical decision or choice that, "typically the hardest choice is the right choice to make and most people avoid making the hard choices because well, they're hard to make." Put another way, sometimes the hardest choice is the simple choice and for some it's hard to choose the simple choice because well it's just too simple.
Einstein's quote is telling for me:
--- "any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex... It takes a touch of genius - and lots of courage to move in the opposite direction."
The past five years has been quite an experience for me. I've learned that I too have my own "Sacred Cows" and hard choices to make - and avoiding these hard choices were preventing me from achieving my goal of effectively solving some really valuable problems for really valuable customers.
I'm happy to say that we are passing through this threshold. It "ain't been easy" - and the Lil Wayne song speaks to me as a founder and inventor in a way that many people probably can't understand - but a few of you will - and this post is for you.
For reasons of confidentiality I am ommitting specific names of entities, however I think you'll still get and appreciate the point.
In the course of delivering mature prototypes for evaluation and assessment purposes to one our customer's, we fell short. To our customer's credit and to our own benefit, they decided that our technology had enough potential to fund an independent technology analysis and evaluation by a world reknown research organization to conduct scientific and engineering analysis to determine the feasibility of perfecting our technology for use by this customer and others.
This analysis was conducted over about a 60 day period. This analysis required us to “let go” of our own internal assumptions and “hunches” about our own technology. We also had to make a critical decision to balance our need to "be right" while accepting third party criticism and face the reality that the end user feedback was not what we expected and that our prototypes fell short in specific areas.
We decided to cooperate fully with this third party in order to help them develop a complete and fully independent technology evaluation and assessment. In parallel, we decided to conduct our own top down product design analysis. Our analysis and their analysis were very similar, not identical, but very close.
In summary, their analysis simple and straightforward and is briefly outlined below:
- MAKO has potential to be a valuable back-packable asset
- As-Delivered version found to be of high quality construction
- Easy, straightforward assembly, operation, recovery.
Additionally, the assessment pointed out that “Actual MAKO flight more stable than the tool [Computational Fluid Dynamics modeling and simulation] predicts.” This means that this prestigious institute and world class team of engineer's had to face their own “sacred cows” based on past patterns, existing knowledge, etc. They admitted that we are breaking new ground and they are now creating new aero models based on how MAKO performs. They have also recommended that our customer proceed with additional steps for perfecting MAKO. They also provided us with invaluable scientific and engineering insight in discovering why our technology works when it works – and why it doesn’t work when it doesn’t work.
Bottom line: We're no longer using the "Weegie Board design process".
Put another way, NO MORE SACRED COWS ALLOWED!!!
Over the past 60 days, we have moved as quickly as we can, along with the enormously critical support and energy and resources of our advisor’s and partner’s to make critical design and construction changes to demonstrate that we will do what needs to be done to perfect our product and satisfy our customer's.
We are presently and quickly incorporating the results of our own top down analysis as well as the evaluator's top down analysis and demonstrating many of these improvements in development to other prospective customers as quickly as we can – we feel like this is important in maintaining and building the credibility of our product as well as our company because we have a product that is close to mature, we are willing to listen and willing to make the critical changes in order to complete the product development to the level of satisfaction of our customer's.
I share this with both of my reader's, because as the founder and the Inventor it’s been an emotional and psychological roller coaster for me to face and accept the criticism of the product’s shortcomings (my own sacred cow). I did not welcome or enjoy this process, however I decided that it was the right thing to do. I believe that this may have been one of the most important decisions of my life and the life of Sofcoast. We are better off having been through this than to have avoided it or been unwilling to face it. Most importantly, the product which consists of our platform and partner payloads, is now maturing rapidly and is now on track to be ready for market entry for various federal and commercial customers this year.
My questions for you, the reader, are as follows:
Do you have any "sacred cows" in your personal or professional life? How are these affecting you?
If you could, would you let go of some of your own "sacred cows"?
What's stopping you?
Cheers,
John
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