The Role of Entrepreneurial-Style Management in Sustainability

By Michael Zentner

Large research and infrastructure projects increasingly involve significant collaborations across many sites with diverse teams. And while simply executing a series of proposed tasks from start to finish can yield strong reports and publications, this approach may thwart sustainable outcomes.

“Sustainability” means that research outcomes live on so that others can utilize them for as long as they are useful to a scientific enterprise. Researchers who think like entrepreneurs and comfortably revisit and “pivot” their activities as necessary can attain sustainable results. Pivoting should be a methodological process — not a demotivating “flavor of the week” that gives a team proverbial whiplash.

Researchers who seek to take a measured and justified approach to pivoting can borrow entrepreneurial techniques like the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS), which is described in Gino Wickman’s Traction. The EOS applies practical methods in a simple form with minimal overhead. I have personally been involved in the application of this method for three distinctly different projects—the Science Gateways Community Institute (SGCI), the Network for Computational Nanotechnology Cyber Platform (NCN-CP), and HUBzero®—and can attest that it fulfills its promise of enabling quick decisions and avoiding complexity.

The Vision/Traction Organizer (V/TO)—a two-page document that describes nearly everything important to an enterprise in an easy-to-read format—comprises the heart of the EOS. Its first set of components is as follows:

• Core Values: Since participating individuals determine a project’s success or failure, leaders should agree on a set of core values to make all hiring decisions. These values must reflect the organization’s goals. As a software creator, HUBzero embraces a “drive for craftsmanship;” as a service organization, SGCI believes that “when others succeed, you succeed” and “when we succeed, others succeed.” 
• Core Focus™: Teams should express a purpose (what they are going to achieve) and a niche (how they are going achieve it) in a small number of words. HUBzero’s purpose is “irresistible, engaging science” and its niche is “innovating research software cyberinfrastructure for scientific communities.” By contrast, NCN-CP serves domain scientists by “enabling a new generation of innovators through user-centric science and engineering.” Its niche involves “making science and engineering products usable, discoverable, reproducible, and easy to create for learners, educators, researchers, and business professionals.”
• 10-year Target™: This is a statement of what the group will achieve in 10 years. To serve end-users, the NCN-CP defines a goal of attaining “250 institutional subscribers, 50 corporate sponsors, 17,000 individual simulation subscribers, and 14,000 individual non-simulation subscribers.” SGCI’s goal is to “by 2026, be the autonomous, world-class leader and premier think tank for science gateways that become a critical path to scientific discovery via 50,000 publications referencing gateways and reaching 500,000 gateway users.”
• Marketing Strategy: This strategy defines to whom one markets, why the marketer is their best choice, and how it will deliver in order to focus efforts in the most productive directions. For example, HUBzero targets “project directors at U.S.-based institutions who are enthusiastic community builders.” The “why us” statement for HUBzero comprises three phrases: (i) “No hassle operations” (remove IT complexities from scientists’ workload), (ii) “Scientific and classroom collaboration features,” and (iii) “Expert team on demand” (projects can access experts in the sectors that they need). HubZero’s “how” is a staged process that begins with understanding project needs and ends with production operations.
• 3-year Picture™: This picture outlines goals for the next three years that work toward the 10-year Target.

The above V/TO elements do not change throughout the year, thus providing stability. The group should review these items annually and completely redevelop the 3-year Picture as if none currently exists. Though this seems counterintuitive, market forces change every year. Financial crises, terrorist attacks, social movements, new political leadership, and novel technologies alter the world in ways that impact many scientific projects. In June 2019, would have understood the looming need for a virtual presence in research and education? Temporarily ignoring the previous 3-year Picture is essential to correcting course and navigating the world of sustainability. Once a team develops a new 3-year Picture, members should review the previous one for adjustments and establish the following V/TO components at the annual and subsequent quarterly meetings:

• One-year Plan: This plan involves a set of measurable goals that bring a project roughly one-third of the way to the 3-year Picture.
• Rocks: A Rock is a task for which a person is accountable during the quarter. At three quarterly meetings, each person is assigned between three and five Rocks. While Rocks do not preclude smaller tasks, they are meant to focus one’s thinking toward the most important activities. The EOS suggests that 80 percent Rock completion rates are an indicator of being sufficiently but not over-ambitious.
• Issues List: A running list of issues that require the management team’s attention should be maintained and addressed on a weekly basis.

Between annual and quarterly meetings, organizations must hold weekly Level 10 (L10) meetings. Regularity of the L10 meeting is important in the EOS — it takes place at the same time and same place every week. Attendees do not schedule conflicting meetings except in rare circumstances. Every L10 meeting follows the same structure:

• Segue (5 minutes): Each person shares their best personal and professional news of the week to emphasize that participants are both professionals and people.
• Scorecard (5 minutes): The group visits a scorecard of metrics to ensure that the enterprise is proceeding as planned. Developing a scorecard that everyone finds both motivating and useful is one of the hardest aspects of the EOS.
• Rock Review (5 minutes): All members review Rock progress with a simple “on track” or “off track.” If one is off track, the meeting lead will add any relevant issues to the issues list for later discussion.
• Customer/Employee Headlines (5 minutes): Each individual provides a quick review of major happenings with respect to staff or outside stakeholders.
• To-do List (5 minutes): The group reviews a running To-do List, noting any relevant issues.
• Identify, Discuss, Solve (IDS) (60 minutes): The team ranks the running list of issues, chooses the top three, and follows the IDS process. After the issue owner briefly describes the problem, the group discusses the issue to gather more information and propose possible solutions. The decided solution is formulated as one or more items for the To-do List. It is only during IDS that members elaborate on “off track” Rocks and To-do items.
• Meeting Close (5 minutes): The group recaps the to-do items, decides on cascading messages for others, and rates the meeting on a scale of one to 10. Participants should articulate what could be done to score a 10 in the future.

The EOS makes a useful distinction between the weekly L10 meetings and the quarterly and annual meetings. Weekly, one is “working in the enterprise;” on longer timeframes, one is “working on the enterprise.” This distinction forms a guiding principle for how participants should approach each type of meeting.

In the three projects for which I have used the EOS, the transformation has been great. The V/TO provides everyone on the extended team with a vision of the project’s direction and even serves as a handy on-boarding introduction. The EOS serves as a metered way of adapting directions toward sustainability goals and concurrently prevents staff from feeling the whiplash effects of frequent changes. A significant but unexpected benefit is the amount of time that one saves when writing quarterly reports for funding agencies. Because every activity is recorded as a Rock or to-do item, most of the reporting involves collecting a set of Rock outcomes and assembling them into a document. EOS also keeps a distributed, virtual team marching to a single beat and pursuing unified goals. Without a sense of unity, many collaborative projects can quickly devolve as the principal investigators pursue their own initiatives.

Each of my three aforementioned projects applied the EOS method at a different time in their lifecycles. With the NCN-CP, the project had been running for more than 15 years with somewhat less structured processes. HUBzero’s project had proceeded for about 10 years by relying on a variety of software development methods. SGCI had the luxury of a greenfield startup wherein it chose its method without any operating history. Regardless of the project stage, the EOS was uniformly beneficial.

I recommend that anyone who is interested in applying the EOS to their projects read Wickman’s Traction and consider hiring an external implementer to put the method into practice.

Michael Zentner is director of the Sustainable Scientific Software Division at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), where he also serves as director of both HUBzero and the Science Gateways Community Institute. At SDSC, he assists academic software projects in developing self-sustaining business models.