One of the more unpleasant parts of running a business is that you get introduced to a ton of business drivel books that pick an outcome and find specific cases to work backwards to somehow prove a theory. People reading them feel good because the content reaffirms their common sense and attitude towards business. So much for Good to Great, if you haven’t read it, don’t bother.

But I thought it would be nice for someone to write the opposite.

Give me “Great to Meh” or “How I lost it all trading options” – I don’t want to read about how great and awesome people are, I want to find out how people failed tremendously so I can avoid being one of those suckers.

So here is my “Great to Meh” moment of the past month.

We’re building this incredible new product. We think it’s going to change this space significantly.

We are working with our usual suppliers, usual hardware, proven software.

But the empire starts to crumble on the most unforseen of tasks.

So the model of the motherboard changed and the vendor assured us it was the same thing. We verified the specs and agreed that it was the same beast.

Everything was the same. Except for the layout. The 4 pin ATX power feed was 4 inches to the left, making the case power 2″ too far away.

I’ll spare you the fact that we paid 4x as much for shipping for each extension cable as we intended to.

What we also did not account for was the new layout in the new 2U SuperMicro chasis that replaced the old one. So when we went to order the same old 180 degree SAS drive data cables because the 90 degree ones overlapped some ports on the old chasis… well, you can tell where this goes. The 180 degree cables protruded out of the 2U cases, back to the parts order page.

So what did we learn today…

First, never trust sales people when they tell you nothing has changed. Order one instead of a pallet.

Second, never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever give people an ETA. No matter how well planned, how well organized or sure you are about a certain outcome there are forces working against you. Unless thing is up and running and sucking down power and has been burned in for at least 3 days, it’s just a concept.

Third, pick a person of authority in your organization that has the final say on yay/nay. Everything heard, read, seen or implied elsewhere should take a huge distant second place to the person in charge, preferably you.

Fourth, count the amount of positive feedback from this. Write a crappy business book and sell it to Karl. Failure in technology business is the norm, not success, so you would be better served learning how to avoid the biggest mistakes failures of this business took. Learn from your mistakes – wouldn’t it be more fun to learn it without making those mistakes in the first place? Absolutely, but nobody would buy such a book, people read for personal fulfillment not to be put through gut wrenching nightmares about how it can all go wrong. I am not sure how to explain the audience this blog gets….. I attribute most of it to my masterful spellling and grammar skills.

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