Reflections on the IOW Experience

As a participant in this inaugural InOneWeekend event, I thought I'd write up some thoughts on the experience and what it meant to me.

Getting ~100 Type-A personalities in one room to assume some semblance of structure was no mean feat, but Jeff Stamp directed the first evening to an impressively effective conclusion. Ideas may be cheap, but good ideas are invaluable. Surprisingly, we had quite a few really good ideas, which makes me think that Cincinnati might just be on the cusp of a new era of entrepreneurship.

Once the idea was selected, I fully expected a significant degree of defection from IOW by those who weren't convinced that it was a viable concept or felt disenfranchised by having their own pet idea discarded. I was amazed that nearly everyone returned Saturday morning to start in on the hard parts: business case development, technical production, market research, financial projections, and so forth...all the stuff that makes a business more than just a concept on a whiteboard.

When we divided ourselves into technical and business groups, it became pretty obvious that we were understaffed on the technology side. So, for our little rag-tag group of tech folks to have accomplished what they did in the time they were given was an impressive combination of coordination, prioritization, and pure brute-force coding.

Saturday seemed to move pretty fluidly, but I think those of us outside the web dev room didn't really appreciate the pace at which we were supposed to be working, as Sunday seemed very rushed to finalize a lot of bits right before the final presentation and wrap-up (I know I could have used another hour...or two...to tidy up the Powerpoint deck). However, at the end, I think most people in the room felt pretty great about what they had accomplished in about 34 hours of actual work time. I know I was astounded that so much order and creation could emerge from what looked like so much chaos.

Given that LifeSpoke, the result of our labors, is now a living, breathing "ongoing concern," it's hard for me to think about IOW as a complete experience...because it's not complete. We're continuing to build and plan and create with the hopes of establishing a brand new, successful venture organically grown from a "why not?" approach to entrepreneurship. But, if I try to evaluate the weekend on its own merits, my personal experience seems best described by a few words:

Connections: Meeting and working with people from all over the region with a dizzying array of backgrounds has introduced me to an entirely new network of relationships, gravid with promise and opportunity.

Adaptation: Working on a project that nobody could have prepared for in advance is exhiliarating, since it evens out skill and experience differences to some degree and greatly democratizes participation. Flexibility was rewarded and those who insisted on a preconceived notion of process or product were forced to evolve their thinking and compromise (at least with themselves) as the overall group moved forward.

Ownership: Ownership can be helpful if it engenders commitment to the end objective, and that's the sense I got from the IOW weekend. Ownership of ideas, however, can be an obstacle to compromise, and, thankfully, I didn't observe much of that at all. And that's an amazing thing given the nature of the motivated, successful, driven people that populated the event.

Diversity: As a business professor (operations management), I tend to focus on a subset of the concerns of the organizations that I work with and teach about. So, it's always amazing to be reminded of the full scope and range of skills and knowledge-sets needed to craft a business in all its glorious detail. From operational technologies to financial strategies to PR tactics and beyond, there is so much to be known and to do, and this group embodied that professional diversity. Also, there was tremendous social diversity in the room, which helped ensure that LifeSpoke wasn't merely something that would appeal to a small niche of like-minded, homogeneous professionals. Research on new service development has shown that team diversity is an important determinant of the success of the product being developed, and that bodes extremely well for LifeSpoke's potential.

The last question I heard people asking at the end of the event is this: "Would you do this again?" Most people were enthusiastic. While I personally think IOW represents an essential ingredient in the success of our region -- i.e., the nurturing of an innovative, entrepreneurial business community -- my response is tethered by more mundane responsibilities and is, therefore, fairly simple: ask my wife.