Research is important – but can delay start ups

Research is important – but can delay start ups

I have sat on the boards of many companies and institutions and whenever we have been confronted by the need to take a quick decision and the board is not ready to take that decision, we have asked the management teams to conduct research to get more information.

How many times, as members of boards of large corporations, have we asked the finance people to run some more numbers or do some more analysis?

How many times have we asked the product design people to redo some pack designs because the “red was not red enough” or the “green could be a little more green”?

How many times have we asked our marketing people to redesign a campaign because we did not think this was “communicating” the right message of the product?

All this additional information was generally called for because as members of a board charged with the responsibility of direction setting for the company, were not ready to take a decision.

For a startup company, research is important to set the direction the company wishes to pursue and not to delay decision making. Research must be an aide to reinforce one’s views and not a crutch to play “I told you so” later, more so if the decision taken does not work out the way it was intended. At the same time, moving forward purely on impulse may also prove to be an expensive process.

Nothing is more important for an entrepreneur to “put his money where his mouth is”.

Research helps mature companies to fine tune decision making. While I am not advocating starting any business enterprise without doing any research, I do believe that too much research delays decision making and therefore the startup journey of any new entrepreneur.

I am reminded of a quote of Sir John Harvey Jones,

“Planning is an unnatural process; it is much more fun to do something. The nicest thing about not planning is that failure comes as a complete surprise, rather than being preceded by a period of worry and depression”

Quote from “The Buck Stops Here – My Journey from Manager to Entrepreneur”