Startup: An Insider's Guide to Launching and Running a Business by Kevin Ready Page A

for each employee. Period. What was chosen was a corporate-level, multi-city, computer-controlled, integrated phone system with dedicated T1 Internet connectivity. It was also a system that was prone to breaking and that nobody on staff understood how to operate. The funny thing about investments like this is that the costs aren’t just in the sticker price. The operational cost was several thousand dollars a month for just the dedicated Internet connecting the offices. It cost us money every time we needed to change the system because we had to hire a specialized consultant to come onsite. These guys were hard to find, difficult to get to answer our phone calls, and outrageously expensive when they did show up. Another hidden expense was lost productivity, when employees and engineering staff were trying to get this thing to work, instead of designing products. Lost calls and unanswered voice mails were yet more cost points for us.
    Instead of pursuing an inexpensive yet adequate solution, the investor who made the purchase decision felt a need for a “phone system.” What followed next was an emotional response to some telco marketing materials that painted a picture of business success and the required infrastructure behind it, which went along the lines of, “Imagine multiple cities combined on one private security network, with intelligent phone message routing, and with productive, smiling, employees happily routing customer after customer to one another on the BizNet 2000 1 phone system.”
    This is a much sexier vision than what we probably actually needed. If it had been planned out in advance (in the absence of the sales propaganda), we could have functioned well enough with a central toll-free number connecting to a receptionist desk with an answering system. Sales people and other staff could have a POTS (plain-old telephone system) line or a cell phone. Is this perfect? No. Would it work? Yes. The actual best-case scenario is probably somewhere between the POTS solution and the BizNet 2000, but the guidance of specific intentions could have led to a saner solution:
    __________
    1 Fictional name.
     
Customers should be able to reach the company by phone, and the company should be able to respond professionally.
Each staff member should have a phone with voice mail.
    Specific intentions, defined before an investment is made, guide how the investment is made, when it is made, how it is executed, and how it is evaluated along the way. This set of specific intentions, if laid out and pursued, could have saved the company a lot of money.
    Backing Up the Truck
    Recently, we had a meeting where the team was discussing what we were going to do to implement Facebook more centrally on our site. The discussion was on where and how Facebook would be added to our user experience. I had joined the meeting late, and was interested in finding out what the point was. I asked that we “back up the truck a bit,” and figure out the answer to “Why?” This is closely related to having a specific intention.
    “ Why are we adding Facebook to the site? What specific intention do we have, and how will that be reached by the options we are discussing?”
    The question seemed to take everyone by surprise. In fact, nobody was able to articulate why we were going to integrate Facebook more centrally into our user experience. Would we get more users? No. Would we get more money, as a business? No. I took a stab at it by saying, “While we don’t have any specific intention to get more customers or more money, we believe that it is useful to experiment with Facebook integration as a means to gain more experience in social media, and to gather data on whether or not users will engage with our brand in more meaningful ways through this tool set.”
    This specific intention, shared between team members, was useful in that it framed the exercise as a reconnaissance mission as opposed to a fundamental reimagining of our brand experience.