As I run workshops for entrepreneurs, a key part of our training is that they have to focus. Entrepreneurs have to select a beachhead market and then actively deselect other markets. It is very common that students have resistance to this step from mild to actively and emotionally rejecting this concept as wrong.  The selecting a market is not so hard but it is the deselecting that causes the problems. As we do in our example, an entrepreneur can’t claim to be disciplined when they are a Lamborghini dealership while they are also taking in the Volvo to service it, as we do in one of the first exercises of the workshop.

But in the eyes of resistors even after they are told they have to deselect, you can still see, they really DON’T want to deselect. They want to do it all. If this is you, don’t feel abnormal. It is perfectly normal for humans to NOT want to close doors. A renowned behavioral economist, Daniel Ariely, has shown how deeply ingrained in our psyche this is in his experiments. “Decision-makers overvalue their options and are willing to overinvest to keep these options from disappearing,” because they have a fear of missing out (FOMO).

You can read Daniel’s books, which I recommend the first one in the recommended books section of this web site under the tab “Resources” or you can just read a summary of this specific behavior in this article from the New York Times to get the essence of this point: https://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/25/dear-irrational-reader-close-the-door/

From my vantage point, the takeaway is twofold. First, focus is extremely important even if it does not feel right in your gut. It will significantly improve your odds of success. Closing off options so you can give full focus to the one you do choose will increase your odds and speed of success or failure. Both of these are good. You can more easily recover from failure if it happens quickly.

The second point is that entrepreneurship is not just intuitive despite what conventional wisdom might lead you to believe. This but one example where if you know the research, you know important first principles based in research that will give you a more systematic knowledge of the decision you are making and hence increase your odds of success. It is another proof point that entrepreneurship is a learned craft that practitioners who studied what they are doing will get better over time. If you are willing to take entrepreneurship seriously as a body of field of study and a body of knowledge, then the more you intelligently practice it, the better you will get.

Last month, from May 20-23, I had the honor of leading an intense four day workshop on Disciplined Entrepreneurship for about 80 participants who were either entrepreneurs, aspiring entrepreneurs or entrepreneurship amplifiers (i.e., educators, people running incubators/accelerators, government agencies supporting entrepreneurship). This is my third year doing it and I really enjoy it for many reasons.

This year, the program was hosted at the University of Stavanger and specifically Professor Jan Frick and Egil Svela in collaboration with the Southwest Norway REAP Team. The first year I did a similar mini-course in Alesund and last summer it was in Kristiansand. Each year the host city has essentially doubled in population size. Next summer, Bergen is the planned host, which will be yet another doubling in size. I feel like I am really getting to know Norway and Norwegians.

Each year brings new insights and this year was no different. Here are my top takeaways the Stavanger workshop and associated discussions:

1. Viking Spirit Lives On: Despite an economy that is booming in large part from the oil industry off its shores, Norwegians still possess the historical Viking spirit. Some participants indicated that they preferred I use a Viking reference as opposed to our common “pirate” references. While clearly selection bias was in play with the people I was meeting, it was impressive how many of the participants wanted more than the comfortable life, which is so prevalent in Norway. They were seeking a challenge. For many of them the challenge was climate change but there were many other as well. Innovation-driven Enterprise (IDE) entrepreneurship was welcomed with open arms.
2. Well Educated and Collaborative Talent Pool: The human talent pool for entrepreneurship is quite strong in two important dimensions. They are very well educated and they are very collaborative.
3. Stable Government and Society: Another factor that helps support entrepreneurship that Norway takes for granted is a stable government and society. As we see in so many other places, disruption at either of these levels makes long term planning and investment more risky, and Norway is at an advantage here.
4. Multi-Stakeholder Model to Support Entrepreneurship: Through the MIT REAP program, Norway has gotten the coordinated involvement of universities, government, risk capital, corporations and the entrepreneurial community to support the development of a more robust innovation-driven entrepreneurial ecosystem. This makes for a much more efficient execution of any program and integration across the portfolio of implemented programs.
5. Bottoms Up Law Still Rules: Even with such models, it is incredibly important to not get de-focused. In Western societies, entrepreneurship is driven “bottoms up”. That means that the engine that will propel advancement is the entrepreneurs themselves. I have not yet seen a successful model to drive entrepreneurship from “tops down” as all the four other stakeholders can do is help facilitate.
6. The Single Necessary and Sufficient Condition for an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem: For a business, the single necessary and sufficient condition for a business is a paying customer. I start all of my classes with this so that students never lose the focus on the ultimate goal. Likewise, to have an entrepreneurial ecosystem, the single necessary and sufficient condition is entrepreneurs. The more entrepreneurs the better but you can also improve and ecosystem by making them higher quality and connecting them together to increase their productivity. That should be the unambiguous goal of any program to build an entrepreneurial ecosystem. Often efforts lose this focus.
7. Kudos to Norway In this Regard: Learning from others, most specifically their Scottish friends, the Norwegians have implemented a plan to allocate resources and focus on the entrepreneurs. The Summer Scale School brings aspiring entrepreneurs together and invests in their training in a “hands-on” manner. It also builds a common language that will foster community that gives each entrepreneur a force-multiplier support structure. They are also doing this with a sustained (as opposed to a one time) investment. In basketball there is a saying “good things take a long time and mostly bad things happen quickly.” Much like Scotland, I am highly confident that with the other assets mentioned above, Norway will see success in the long term. I really believe in this multi-year grass roots programs as the fundamental component of creating sustainable innovation-driven entrepreneurial ecosystem. Regions often become mesmerized by recent events, new unicorns or the entrepreneurial hot topic du jour and undervalue a disciplined systematic longer-term approach when it is clear the latter works much, much better.

Random final comment on Norway trip … thanks to good friend Bjørn-Tore Flåten who so graciously took me to the fitness room on the next to last day where they had a basketball court. I was able to find my way into a basketball game with some of the locals (picture courtesy of another good friend Peter Klemsdal) and enjoyed mixing it up with the locals. Little did they know that the person playing with them was three times their age. This however was not relevant on the basketball court. All that matters that court of pure meritocracy is whether you win or not. (Note: we won.)

As the Disciplined Entrepreneurship 24 step methodology has become more refined and robust from all the utilization it has gotten of the past five years, it has become clear to me that more and more the gating factor to success is the quality of the information utilized in executing the framework. This is Primary Market Research (PMR). If we put garbage PMR in, we will get garbage results out.

However, how do we get good customer and market data? That was an important element of the DE Workbook and I did some research to write the primer in that book. Still, I felt I did not do it justice. There is some good work done by Giff Constable and Frank Rimalovski with their books Talking to Humans and Testing with Humans, but even with these books, there is more needed.

As I have thought about this, given lectures and done a lot of coaching in this area, I have come back to journalists as being great purveyors of this skill. The good ones are able to be empathetic listeners, they are able to assess a situation and incredibly efficiently and effectively extract information from people. In fact, this is a fundamental of their job, which they have to perform every day.

This past week during a workshop in Norway, I had the great fortune to have a highly accomplished (6 years) journalist who was a participant. As I was talking about this subject, this fact became known and I had him speak to the class about how he gets so much information. He gave a brilliant 15-minute talk which led me to ask him if he could summarize the key actionable points in a short email.

Below are Trygve Meyer’s 15 key points. Trygve spent 6 years working at Bloomberg interviewing thousands of people up to the highest levels in Norway. I find them useful to think about but the key is to practice them so they become second nature.

Here they are with a sincere thanks to Trygve for sharing them:

1. The start of any good interview is preparation. Do your homework and use the resources at your disposal to collect information. For instance, using LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, friends, colleagues, publications etc. This information will not only make the interview more productive, but it will also make the interviewer more comfortable from the start of the interview.
2. Do spend a little time before the interview in their normal setting. Use your senses – eyes and ears. Pay attention to layout, view, objects such as art and books.
3. Find a good location for doing the interview. Preferably away from their normal office space. It is best to avoid a space they “own,” but at the same time, it has to be a place where the setting that will bring the interviewed person to ease. So, familiarity is important – need to be on “their territory.” Avoid public spaces too because of distractions and noise.
4. Write down your questions in advance. Have at least twice as many questions as you plan to ask. Some questions get covered during the interview without being asked, so to avoid cutting it short – have backup questions.
5. Ask if it is OK that you use a recording device. Clarify that it will be “only used for reference” and will not be used in any other setting or way.
6. Make sure you make a series of open-ended questions that can create further avenues for exploration. “What is your ideal solution/resolution? Why do you care about this problem? Do you have any ideas for how to solve the problem?” Then follow up by “You said xyz – what did you mean by that? Can you further elaborate?”
7. Have a clear plan for the progression of questions. Start with easy and open questions that will make the interviewed person to further ease and open up. A typical question can be: tell me about your normal workday?
8. Work on asking the questions. Think of varieties of the same question. How many different ways can you ask the same question? How old are you? When were you born?
9. If questions are avoided – go back and revisit the topic through a rephrased version of the same question. By the third time, something is answered the depth level and context will start to be close to the “truth.”
10. Ask the person being interviewed to re-enact or show you how certain things are done or how a particularly interesting point happened.
11. Use “yes”, smiles and positive grunts to reinforce what is being said. A supportive and empathetic listener will get more information than one that is not supportive. Keep in mind that you will want to strike a balance between becoming a cheerleader and getting the job done of getting the information.
12. Use body language to reinforce the “yes” and the grunts. Nodding of head etc. May want to “mimic” the person being interviewed if this falls natural to you. Not like every move because it should not be done in a way that makes it obvious and it looks like you are fully replicating their every move.
13. Do not sit with your arms crossed. Do not lean back and seem disinterested. Sit at the front of the chair and listen keenly to what is being said.
14. Don’t jump in with new question once the previous one is answered. Silence and pause often will prompt the interviewed person to fill the silence with more information. Likewise, keep recording after the “official” interview is over. There are often snippets of gold being offered right as one is rounding off.  The interviewed person is then at the most relaxed and lets down their guards.
15. Bring a “wing-man”. Keep in mind that it takes a lot of concentration to listen and guide a conversation in an interview setting. A second person can spend their time observing body language and be a second note taker. Always good to have someone to discuss answers and observations with after an interview.

In addition to these, Trygve shared that his mindset and often openly shared approach for any interview that. “I have no opinion on this matter.” Of course, over time, he will start to form an opinion but it is important that he start in a non-judgmental frame of mind so he is completely open to whatever the person being interviewed is saying. A good journalist (and PMR collector) does not steer the conversation to his hypotheses (bad journalist do). It is very important that is your overall tone and it is projected and acted upon for the whole interview. You are NOT selling, you are in inquiry mode and collecting data points to be analyzed.

Do you agree with the key points above? If so, which and what would you suggest? Are there other key tips that you want to share?

PMR is a skill that develops over time. Like entrepreneurship, it is learned in the apprenticeship model. You can only really learn by doing but still, it is nice to know the fundamental principles you should be executing when you “do”. So jump in and try the techniques mentioned about. You should always be doing PMR so it should not be long from now. The day a company stops doing PMR is the day that the company begins the slow but sure process of dying.