The Wisdom of Jim Barksdale

Jim Barksdale was CEO and President of Netscape. For those of you too young to know what Netcape was, it was the original high flying dotcom company. The first large scale Web browser.

Jim Barksdale is a Southerner and spoke with a folksy wisdom that, I find, inspring. I keep a running note of his quotes and refer to them often. Here are some of my favorites.

“Never mistake a clear view for a short distance.”
Things always take longer than you expect even when you have clarity on the problem and the solution.

"The enemy is on the outside."
Internal fighting and power struggles can draw too much energy from people. Important to remember that competition and the market is where to focus.

"We're going to jump with every chute we build."
I don’t know when Jim said this but assuming it was Netscape era (1995-1999) he was talking about dog fooding long before it became the standard practice.

"Every good list of objectives has either 3 or 5 things. If it's 4, you either got one too many, or you forgot something. If you can't remember your objectives without looking at a piece of paper, you can't hardly achieve them except maybe by accident."
I hate OKRs and most of the goal setting exercises done in large organizations because they violate these rules. If every team, discipline, org, company creates objectives you end up with this sprawling recursive list that no one remembers and many of the goals are contradictory and compete with each other.

"The infantry is always ahead of headquarters."
The people with the most information about a product are the people building it, not some VP 5 levels up. Most decision making should be made on the ground. HQ’s job is co-ordination.

"Your job is to run as fast as you can towards the cliff. My job is to move the cliff."
What a great articulation of leadership. The role of leadership is to make sure teams don't go off cliffs.

"That's kind of like a houseboat: not a good house... not a good boat."
Design by committee or trying to avert risk by piling everything into a product leads to a house boat.

"Three kinds of people: 1) see change and think of ways to capitalize, 2) see change and can't think of a way to capitalize, 3) don't see the change."
Which are you?

“Great opportunities are the ones that solve great problems. And a great opportunity for wealth is solving the last link in the chain, that holds the whole system back from working.”
Great products remove friction by identifying problems and solving them for people. This is the crux of Jobs To be Done but really any good design process. This quote identifies two distinct aspects in products. The first, is where most teams spend energy but the “last link in the chain” is much harder. Being able to see a full value chain is essential and most teams/companies stop short.

“Nobody that I know can predict the next two pings of the pinball.”
A lot of people want certainty before committing resources to a product, feature, initiative. But that is folly. There is no data about the future and pretending like there is isn’t intellectually honest.

“In a fight between a bear and an alligator, it is the terrain which determines who wins.” When competing in a market, it isn’t always the strongest who wins. Extrinsic factors dominate.

Now I’m the President around here. So if I say a chicken can pull a tractor trailer, your job is to hitch ’em up. If we have data, let’s look at data. If all we have are opinions, let’s go with mine.”
Too many debates can swirl inside companies. It is important for leaders to make decisions to unblock teams, even if that decision is an opinion.

"Only two ways to make money in the software business: bundling and unbundling."
Services are in a constant state of bundling and unbundling. These go in waves of creative destruction. Knowing what part of the cycle you are can keep you from being disrupted.