There was man who wanted to become rich by playing the lotto. Every evening he kneeled in front of his bed and prayed: “Please, make me a Lotto winner. I need it so much, right now!” The next evening he again prayed: “Oh, please, let me win the Lotto. I so much want a Million dollars!” And so he prayed for over a year getting more and more desperate. One evening, all of a sudden, the sky opened and a thundering voice said: “I really want to help you. But, could you please buy a Lotto ticket?”

This is a joke I heard many years ago and – in real European fashion – it was a joke about a Scotsman with the obvious conclusion about how cheap Scotsmen are said to be.

But, this joke has important implications for “want-to-be-entrepreneurs”! And, that’s why I have been thinking about it a lot recently: In order to create entrepreneurial success, we have to actually try! In order to get feedback from customers, we have to actually ask them! In order to raise funds for our company, we have to actually pitch ideas to funders.

There are a surprising number of people who fail at this first and fundamental step. Success does not come from talking about things; it comes from actually doing something to make them happen. The reason so many people fail at this first and most essential step is because – for the first time – failure can occur. If you buy a Lotto ticket, you may actually lose. If you ask a funder for support, she may actually say no.

 There are many ways the joke does not work for entrepreneurship: First, entrepreneurship is not just about good and bad luck – it’s about learning to create success quickly enough through a series of actions and learning experiences to pivot and model the idea until it actually works. So, the bad news is it’s a lot harder than buying a Lotto ticket, but the good news is you can make your own luck. Second, entrepreneurship, for most people, is not about making money, it’s about improving lives of people and changing the world to be a better place.

In short, if you want to become an entrepreneur, a top-researcher or a change agent – start trying! It’s a lot of fun!

BTW – one more joke about Scotsmen: “How many Scotsmen does it take to change a light bulb? Oh! It’s not that dark!” Go ahead, think about this one… (:

We sometimes hear some heart-wrenching story about somebody’s experience: “I went to restaurant X and the food was amazing!” Excited, we go make a reservation in said restaurant and – guess what – things are not quite as good as we had heard they would be. This is because one single event does not provide enough data content to make a well-informed decision.

The aphorism “the plural of anecdote is not data” is often accredited to Frank Kotsonis, a pharmacologist. But, I heard it for the first time during a recent meeting of a committee during which National policy was being discussed. My colleague used this quote to warn the group about jumping to conclusions based only on two great anecdotes. We needed broader, more representative data to make an informed decision.

We have to be very careful not to inadvertently bias whom we talk to. I made that mistake today. Recently, I was part of a discussion about a specific topic regarding faculty opinions. Most of the professors I talk to share my opinion about this topic. But, I learned pretty quickly that there are other opinions around. Clearly, my friends are a biased sample and I was slightly out of touch with the general opinion.

This aphorism has a lot of meaning to entrepreneurs. Good entrepreneurial decisions are based on data – enough data. Entrepreneurs don’t have time to perform year-long statistical evaluations and questionnaires. They often need to act before they really have the best data available. But, they cannot walk into the trap in the opposite direction – just because I talked to two vendors and they like our product, we do not yet have a hit.

We need to find the boundaries of our market segment. So, why will they buy our product? In fact, who are “they”?  Are they just my friends? Are there some common characteristics between the people I talked to that could turn into an important bias? Are they credible?

It is essential as entrepreneurs that we ask the questions ourselves. We cannot delegate this activity – it’s too important.  Entrepreneurship wise man Steve Blank has made that this point repeatedly! We cannot listen to anecdotes through the filter of an eager sales person. We need to encounter ourselves what the data really is and what the customers really want. Sooner or later we will pay for not doing this job properly.

The plural of anecdote is not data!

This is an editorial written for the Michigan EntrepreNews . It addresses some key goals and objectives on my mind as I return back from 8 months abroad! 

As my sabbatical draws to an end, I sit with my luggage packed and feel my work here in Switzerland is completed. My thoughts reflect on the past few months with our Entrepreneurship Programs and our Center for Entrepreneurship. My perspective over the last eight months has been as an outsider, if you will. I spent most of my time in Switzerland, with monthly trips back to Ann Arbor, and I realized the time I spent thinking of the CFE far exceeded the time I spent working for the CFE. Now I am ready to get back to work and see how useful my thoughts and perspectives really are. But I do want to share with you some of these ―outsider ideas that have been brewing in my head.

“I believe we have only just begun to scratch the surface.” Doug and his crew have achieved amazing successes which have started to put a national and international spot-light on the CFE and its partners. The University of Michigan‘s commitment to entrepreneurship has been communicated at all levels and thus we see an open road with huge opportunities. I would have never guessed that there was such tremendous and transformative potential in our programs. But, I now look at TechArb and the academic program Aileen is putting together with committed partners from the Ross School of Business, the Office of Technology Transfer and many others, and I wonder about our future. We have tremendous upside potential. The University of Michigan is one of the few places in the world that can do a 10,000 pitches competition – beating by a factor of 10 our initial goals. We can attract the most entrepreneurial students in the country through unique programs that combine breakthrough research and their entrepreneurial drive, and thus UM can increase its entrepreneurial successes from research many-fold. Our primary drive is no longer motivated by the fact that we need to catch up to other US entrepreneurial programs-we are now driven because we see our potential to create a Michigan entrepreneurship experience which can become a model of leading universities that seek to be a critical and enabling part of a new generation of entrepreneurial ecosystems. The key question is, How far are we willing to go?

“I believe we need to eat our own entrepreneurial dog food.” To be the best Entrepreneurship program of the future, we need to act like entrepreneurs. We must adapt in an environment which is not always used to risk-taking, trying new things, and an approach that encourages learn-as-you-go. When applying entrepreneurial principles to our decision making and programs, we become models for what we preach, and we motivate our environment to become more entrepreneurial as well. To my initial surprise, I believe there are more aspects to our work within the University for which we can learn from our entrepreneurship lessons. For example, I think most members of my research group would agree that our group is better since we started thinking more systematically about collaboration, about brainstorming, about project trials, and about test-marketing. We may have other words for these things in our research or education worlds, but I learned these lessons from my entrepreneurial friends and during events like the CFE Bay Area trip and our Friday seminars. Different perspectives create new solutions – even in fundamental research about space science!

“I believe we need to keep learning from others.” A key strength to our entrepreneurship efforts has been, from the beginning, that we received help from people with different perspectives. Many of these have turned into partners, collaborators and friends who share with us a lot of success. This help allowed us to prioritize and not waste time on dead-ends. I think there is still a lot to learn and we would be wise to keep using different perspectives along the way. Even as we create success, we need our friends to keep asking questions, or we will end up with the all-too common problem: People who look through keyholes are apt to get the idea that most things are keyhole shaped. These limitations could focus us on things that may seem increasingly important, but which are really taking our eye off the ball. I therefore ask our friends to continue to engage and remind us if we don‘t understand the key point the first time. The key question for our work will increasingly become how responsive we are to change around us. I therefore think that Darwin‘s lesson is very much applicable for us, too: It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.”

If there is anything I have learned at the CFE is that entrepreneurship is about this change: Most of our best successes start with a failed idea! Thus, some of my perspectives provided above may change as well, but not our desire to do the best job we can do-together!

To be successful in our endeavors, we must learn how to focus. This focusing process is very difficult because it forces us to say no to a variety of things we could be doing to enable what we must do to be successful. Also, decisions can be driven by similarly opposing values which seem to contradict no matter what. But, it’s these contradictions that lead to new and truly excellent decisions. I also believe the same rules apply in our career choices, our research plans and so many other important decisions in our lives.

In his book, “Good to Great,” Jim Collins talks about focusing on three key questions that help us to decide whether or not we are focusing correctly and in a manner that can make us successful. Collins suggests that we should ask the following three specific questions.

1. What can we be best in the World at?
2. What are we really passionate about?
3. What drives our economic engine?

The first question indicates that “a little better than others” is just not good enough to succeed if we want to be great. What is it that makes us unique? The second question points to the fact that we can only over-achieve in a place where we have a deep and personal commitment to do so. And the third question addresses the fact that the best idea does not become sustainable if it does not have a way to feed itself, so to say, so it can grow.

Here, I want to focus on the first question – “What can we be best in the World at?” In my personal experiences, finding the answer to this relates to our ability to embrace contradictions and to find ways to take advantage of tensions between values that initially seem to exclude each other’s validity.

Consider, for example, the tension between small and big in the context of a college choice. A potential engineering student looking for a college to go to could think of this as a choice that is mutually exclusive: go to a small college, you know everybody – go to Michigan, you know nobody. Yet, that’s not how it works – and the moment a student comes to Michigan, she learns that the question should not be asked from the point of view of a college administrator, but from the point of view of the student. In my college of choice, do I have the opportunities to do research with a famous professor? Do I prefer working in small teams? Do I learn better in a family-style atmosphere or in the Starbucks at the street corner? Do I have the opportunities to pursue my passion to help people out of environments defined by social injustice – at the same time as pursuing my passion for engineering? Do I have the opportunity to compete internationally in student teams? In some cases, a very small college may be precisely what the incoming student may want, but in other cases, it will be Michigan.

Most importantly, a student at Michigan will see that there is lots of excitement in the tension between small and big: We can build a small team with members from a huge variety of backgrounds. I would argue that that is something Michigan cannot be beat – by anyone!

When we started the Center for Entrepreneurship we had a similar challenge: Do we want to focus on the thousands of students of the University of Michigan and challenge them into talking to us about their ideas, or do we want to find the best 20-50 people who want to start amazing companies. We have built a system we think as the entrepreneurial value-chain. What we are doing is not focused on one or the other; it is in empowering our people to climb up the ladder. Out of the thousands of people MPowered talks with about their ideas – who are the ones that are willing to try something, new and amazing? And, from that, what activities can be scaled up? And finally, from these, who can unleash their ideas into those said companies? Once we are there, we can partner with people who are very good at taking the next step, such as the Zell-Lurie Institute, the Venture Center in Technology Transfer, or even Community based groups like SPARK. If we build and continually improve this system, we will become the best University-based entrepreneurship program – bar none!

Thus, to answer the question about how we become the best in the world, we need to embrace contradictions! What is the solution if we do A and B at the same time – even though it first seems like A and B are contradictory? I am convinced this is one of the key lessons we learn when we start setting ambitious goals. Such goals may be in our careers and in our personal lives. Focusing often does not mean to make choices between opposing values – but to take the tension between these values to create something truly new and excellent!

With this, I wish everybody a great start to a new semester. May it lead to success in your life, in your environment and in your many endeavors!  Always, be sure to aim high enough! And, please come and say hi in the Center for Entrepreneurship, its partners mentioned above, and also my office.