If you've ever wondered why agile or lean development techniques work,The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development by Donald G. Reinertsen is the book for you. It's quite simply the most advanced product development book you can buy.


For those who hunger for a rigorous approach to managing product development, Donald Reinertsen's book is epic. Myths are busted on practically every page, even myths that are associated with lean/agile. For example, take the lean dictum of working in small batches. I push this technique quite often, because traditional product development tends to work in batches that are much too large. Yet it's not correct to say that batch sizes should be as small as possible. Reinertsen explains how to calculate the optimal batch size from an economic point of view, math and all. It's wonderful to have an author take these sorts of questions seriously, instead of issuing yet another polemic.

The book is structured as a series of principles, logically laid out and briefly discussed - 175 in all. It moves at a rapid clip, each argument backed up with the relevant math and equations: marginal profit, Little's law, Markov processes, probability theory, you name it. This is not for the faint of heart.

The use of economic theory to justify decisions is a recurring theme of the book. Its goal is to help us recognize that every artifact of our product development process is really just a proxy variable. Everything: schedules, efficiency, throughput, even quality. In order to trade them off against each other, we have to convert their impact into economic terms. They are all proxies for our real goal, maximizing an economic variable like profit or revenue.Therefore, in order to maximize the true productivity (aka profitability) of our development efforts, we need to understand the relationships between these proxy variables.

Just for the economic explanations, this book would be worth the price of admission. But it goes beyond that, including techniques for improving the economics of product development. Reinertsen weaves together ideas from lean manufacturing, maneuver warfare, queuing theory, and even the architecture of computer operating systems and the Internet. It's refreshing to see ideas from these different domains brought together in a coherent way:

If we limit ourselves to the relatively simple WIP [work-in-progress] constraints used in lean manufacturing, we will underexploit the power of WIP constraints. Instead, we will explore some of the more advanced ideas used in the world of telecommunications.

If we showed the Toyota Production System to an Internet protocol engineer, it is likely that he would remark, "That is a tail-dropping FIFO queue. That is what we started with on the Internet 30 years ago. We are now four generations beyond that method." I mention this to encourage you to look beyond the manufacturing domain for approaches to control flow.

Reinertsen is keenly aware of what makes product development different from other business functions, like manufacturing, that we sometimes use as a metaphor. Product development deals in designs, which are fundamentally intangible. This is why product development routinely creates disruptive innovation, because our ability to invent new products is limited only (well, primarily) by our capacity for imagination. And yet it is this same ephemeral nature that gives rise to the most difficult problems of product development: how to tell if we're making progress, the high variability of most product development tasks (e.g. will this bug take 5 minutes or 5 weeks to fix?), and the resulting extreme uncertainty that is, incidentally, the environment where startups thrive.

To motivate you to buy this book, I want to walk you through some of Reinertsen's indictment of the status quo in product development, which is based on his extensive interviews, surveys, and consulting work. He starts the book with twelve cardinal sins. See if any of these sound familiar:

1. Failure to correctly quantify economics.
2. Blindness to queues.
3. Worship of efficiency.
4. Hostility to variability.
5. Worship of conformance.
6. Institutionalization of large batch sizes.
7. Underutilization of cadence.
8. Managing timelines instead of queues.
9. Absence of WIP constraints.
10. Inflexibility.
11. Noneconomic flow control.
12. Centralized control.

Reinertsen is not pulling punches. For example, here's him discussing our collective blindness to queues:

To understand the economic cost of queues, product developers must be able to answer two questions. First, how big are our queues? Today, only 2 percent of product developers measure queues. Second, what is the cost of these queues? To answer this second question, we must determine how queue size translates into delay cost, which requires knowing the cost of delay. Today, only 15 percent of product developers know the cost of delay. Since few companies can answer both questions, it should be no surprise that queues are managed poorly today.

Or take this indictment of our worship of efficiency:

But, what do you product developers pay attention to? Today's developers incorrectly try to maximize efficiency ... Any subprocess within product development can be viewed in economic terms. The total cost of the subprocess is composed of its cost of capacity and the delay cost associated with its cycle time. If we are blind to queues, we won't know the delay cost, and we will only be aware of the cost of capacity. Then, if we seek to minimize total cost, we will only focus on the portion we can see, the efficient use of capacity.

This explains why today's product developers assume that efficiency is desirable, and that inefficiency is an undesirable form of waste. This leads them to load their porcesses to dangerously high levels of utilization. How high? Executives coming to my product development classes report operating at 98.5 percent utilization in the precourse surveys. What will this do? [This book] will explain why large queues form when processes with variability are operated at high levels of capacity utilization.

Or consider principle B9: The Batch Size Death Spiral Principle: Large batches lead to even larger batches:

The damage done by large batches can become regenerative when a large batch project starts to acquire a life of its own. It becomes a death march where all participants know they are doomed, but no one has the power to stop. After all, when upper management has been told a project will succeed for 4 years, it is very hard for anyone in middle management to stand up and reverse this forecast...

Our problems grow even bigger when a large project attains the status of the project that cannot afford to fail. Under such conditions, management will almost automatically support anything that appears to help the "golden" project. After all, they want to do everything in their power to eliminate all excuses for failure.

Have you had trouble buying a new piece of test equipment? Just show it will benefit the "golden" project and you will get approval. Have a feature that nobody would let you implement? Find a way to get it into the requirements of the "golden" projec. These large projects act as magnets attracting additional cost, scope, and risk...

At the same time, large batches encourage even larger batches. For example, large test packages bundle many tests together and grow in importance with increasing size. As importance grows, such test packages get even higher priority. If engineers want their personal tests to get high priority, their best strategy is to add them to this large, high-priority test package. Of course, this then makes the package even larger and of higher priority.

This snippet is characteristic of Reinertsen's writing style and reasoning. He shows how the actions of people inside traditional systems are motivated by their rational assessment of their own economics. By setting up the wrong incentives, we are rewarding the very behaviors that we seek to prevent. Reinertsen has a visceral anger about all that waste, and his stories are crackling with disdain for the people who manage such systems - especially when their actions are motivated by intuition, voodoo, or blindness. Startups are frequently guilty as charged - the 4-year death march example above could be written about dozens of venture-backed companies slogging it out in the land of the living dead.

Reinertsen does not speak about startups specifically - his book is meant to speak broadly to product development teams across industries and sectors. Yet his analysis of the sources of waste in development and the remedies that allow us to iterate faster are especially useful for startups. There is an important caveat, however. Product development in established companies and markets has a clear economic rationale to judge effectiveness and productivity. The goal is to increase profitability by making high-ROI investments in new products. To give one example, Reinertsen emphasizes the power of measuring the cost of delay (COD) of a new product. That is, in order to make economically rational decisions about cycle time for a given process, we should understand what it costs the company if the products produced by that process are delayed by, say, one day. Armed with that information, we can make rational trade-offs. Take one of Reinertsen's example:

Unhappy with late deliveries, a project manager decides he can reduce variability by inserting a safety margin or buffer in his schedule. He reduces uncertainty in the schedule by committing to an 80 percent confidence schedule. But, what is the cost of this buffer? The project manager is actually trading cycle time for variability. We can only know if this is a good trade-off if we quantify both the value of the cycle time and the economic benefit of reduced variability.

Does this sound familiar? Many of the startups I talk to - and their boards - seem to equate ability to "hit the schedule" with competence and productivity. Yet timely delivery of new features often comes at the expense of agility, especially if cycle times are long. That is often a bad trade (although, as I'm sure Reinertsen would hasten to add, not always!). For example, many startups would do better by removing buffers from their schedules, embracing the variability of their delivery times, and reducing their cycle times.

Even worse, and unlike their established counterparts, startups often experience a non-quantifiable cost of delay. In a truly new market, we face no meaningful competition, there are no tradeshows to present at, and customers are not clamoring for our product. This means that there are no external factors that argue for shipping product on any given day. A day delay has almost no cost, as far as profitability is concerned. Remember that startups operate by a different unit of progress: what I call validated learning about customers. Any activity that promotes learning is progress, and productivity needs to be measured with respect to that. And that's also where we need to modify some of the specific practices Reinertsen recommends. If the product development team can be engaged in activities that promote business learning at the expense of shipping - or even selling - product, that's a good trade. Hence the need for partitioning our resources into a separate problem team and solution team. As with any methodology, applying the principles faithfully may require modifying the practices to fit a specific context.

Let me close with an excerpt of Reinertsen at his best, using an unexpected example to illustrate the power of fast feedback to make learning more efficient:

It should be obvious that fast feedback improves the speed of learning. What may be less obvious is that fast feedback also increases the efficiency with which we generate information and learn new things. It does this by compressing the time between cause and effect. When this time is short, there are fewer extraneous signals that can introduce noise into our experiment.

Team New Zealand designed the yacht that won the America's Cup. When they tested improvements in keel designs, they used two virtually identical boats. The unimproved boat would sail against the improved boat to determine the effect of a design change. By sailing one boat against the other, they were able to discriminate small changes in performance very quickly.

In contrast, the competing American design team used a single boat supplemented by computer models and NASA wind tunnels. The Americans could never do comparison runs under truly identical conditions because the runs were separated in time ...

Team New Zealand completed many more cycles of learning, and they generated more information in each cycle. This ultimately enabled them to triumph over a much better funded American team. It is worth noting that Team New Zealand explicitly invested in a second boat to create this superior test environment. It is common that we must invest in creating a superior development environment in order to extract the smaller signals that come with fast feedback.

There's far more material in this book that I would love to be able to excerpt. Unfortunately, each principle builds on the previous ones so tightly that it's hard to form coherent excerpts without quoting the whole thing. And that's exactly my point. When we're ready, this book has a tremendous amount to teach all of us. It's not a beginner's guide, and it doesn't hold your hand. Instead, it tackles the hard questions head-on. I've read it and re-read it; for a process junkie like me, I just can't put it down. I hope you'll enjoy it as much as I have.

The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development

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I recently passed my ten-year anniversary of becoming an entrepreneur. I almost didn't realize it, but there's no escaping the math. In the summer of 1999, I started working on a startup from my college dorm. I'd eventually take a leave of absence from school and pursue it full-time, making just enough progress to catch the tail end of the dot-com bubble - and all of the dot-bomb crash. As we say, it was a "good learning experience."

Since then, entrepreneurship has occupied me in one form or another pretty much full-time. Much of what I've learned over the years has been invested in this blog, and that makes creating a sweeping summation challenging. I'm honored to be advancing the work of putting entrepreneurship on a more rigorous footing. But that's still in the future. Looking back, what strikes me the most is not how much I've learned - it's how much time I wasted on stuff that turned out to be utterly unimportant.

I pretty much missed all the trends. I'd been on the internet since I was playing MUDs as a kid, but by 1999 I felt I'd already missed the boat. All the good domain names were taken, all the good ideas were being implemented. If I'd bought just a handful of the "best of the rest" domain names that were available at the time (for a whopping $70 each), I probably could have just retired right then. And the great ideas that became today's successful tech startups dwarf anything that had been done to that point. I just couldn't imagine what the next ten years of innovation would look like. Yet my feeling of having missed out prevented me from experimenting with ideas that might have worked.

Nonetheless, my first startup was a tool for college students from elite colleges to create resumes and help them find jobs. Getting students to create their online profile was easy, but getting employers to pay for access proved difficult. Unfortunately, we were fixated on "building a real business" and never noticed that maybe students would want to share their profiles with each other. Could we have built the first college-based social network five years before Facebook? Maybe, but the thought never even entered our minds. (You can even see the humiliating evidence of my smug incompetence in this absurd article from 1999.) We were focused on revenue, but we didn't understand that revenue is not important for its own sake in an early stage company. Instead, we should have thought of it as an indication of validated learning.

And speaking of Facebook, I definitely didn't think it was a good idea when I first heard about it. Heck, I'd already seen Friendster flame out. What was different this time? And Google? No business model, either. I turned down two opportunities to interview at Google in its pre-AdWords days. It seemed like just a bunch of research-oriented PhD's. Oops. And then, at my first Silicon Valley startup, I watched friends get laid off in successive waves as it started to fail. Almost all of them got scooped up by pre-IPO Google this time. I was "lucky" to not be laid off, or so I thought. Yet, as it turns out, the earlier you got laid off, the earlier you got your Google options. That year, right before the IPO, those months mattered a great deal in terms of financial outcomes.

And while I'm confessing, let me add that I knew Matt Cohler way before he was famous. When he left his consulting job to join LinkedIn (whatever that was), I didn't think twice about it. In fact, I remember sending him and his obscure-to-me co-founder (aka Reid Hoffman) a bug report early-on, instead of taking them up on their offer of an in-person meeting. Doh! And when Matt left LinkedIn to take the reins at Facebook; once again, it didn't register. I was much more focused on other transient success stories of the day. I managed to be envious of dozens of other companies, founders, and colleagues who seemed to be having tremendous success but later turned out to be a mirage. If you'd asked me to rank the top most important people I'd met that year, I doubt it would look very impressive in retrospect.

I'm confident of that last statement, because I made the same mistake again a few years later, when I won an award in 2007. BusinessWeek named me one of the top young entrepreneurs in tech, based on my work at IMVU. Being called a techno-wonderboy in front of everyone I knew was pretty strange, and it felt stranger still to be taking credit for the hard work of the many people who really made IMVU a success. But they were very supportive, and the experience was a good one. Trying to take full advantage of the opportunity, I even reached out and met a few of the other award winners. But, looking back, was it obvious which of the other winners were destined to create world-changing companies? Nope. I completely missed Twitter, for example, which was just one more company to me. Oops.

And yet, missing out on these trends wasn't the end of the world. If I had joined Google early, I'd never have had the opportunity to be part of the founding of IMVU. Then I wouldn't have the chance to work with the incredible employees and mentors from whom I learned so much. And, as I've said many times on this blog, if it weren't for those colossal failures and embarrassing missteps, I'd never have learned anything of significance. So, looking back, I'm grateful for the failures and missed opportunities, embarrassing though they are.

One thing really stands out to me today. I wasted a lot of energy, time, and passion on trend-spotting and trying to compare my success with others. Is it really worthwhile spending time and money trying to impress each other with our supposed successes, especially in a business where real feedback can take five or ten years? We go to mixers, buy fancy offices, focus on PR, and try to one-up each other. I think it's wasteful. Instead, let's focus on building companies that matter, on creating real value for customers, and learning. In time, success will come. And if it doesn't, at least you'll have spent your time doing something intrinsically worthwhile.

In the meantime, don't worry if you can't spot the trends. Neither can the rest of us (well, except for Matt Cohler).

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"Okey, watch Tahan ikut abang. Nama abang, Ahmad Mukrim. Panggil je Abang Mukrim."
Penampilannya agak menarik. Menyarungkan cekak rambut di kepala. Kelihatan mesra dan humor.

"Okay, kat sini kena ikut peraturan. Tak boleh ikut kepala sendiri. Sesiapa yang langgar peraturan akan dihantar balik serta merta. Barang-barang yang diharamkan adalah rokok, duit, kad pengenalan, telefon bimbit, semua jenis alat elektronik dan majalah-majalah. Kalau ada sila serahkan kepada saya. Di sini kita akan menjalani kehidupan 'back to basic'. Semua benda-benda itu tidak diperlukan di sini.





"Kalau takde rokok matilah saya bang. Bagila sehari sebatang ke. Saya sehari boleh habis sekotak bang. Jadi gila kalau saya tak hisap 7 hari." Rashid tiba-tiba memecah suasana. Budak seorang ni memang perokok tegar. Rokok untuknya sudah kemestian, seperti mestinya orang Melayu makan nasi hari-hari."

'Dahsyat mamat ni. Sekotak rokok tu mesti dah 6-7 ringgit. Sehari sekotak, banyak betul di bakar duit. Kalau sebulan istiqamah dia hisap, nak dekat RM200 lebih terbakar. Tentu baik kalau duit tu dibuat sedekah atau infaq di jalan dakwah. Ramai ikhwah-ikhwah yang pergi program dakwah yang memerlukannya. Syazwan tu kadang-kadang terpaksa ikat perut sebab nak simpan duit untuk follow up sekolah. Tentu senang hati Syaz kalau dapat bantuan tu. Semoga Allah memberikannya peluang untuk memperbaiki diri.' Ibrahim bermonolog sendirian.

"Jangan risau, abang simpan je. Tak amek sebatang pun. Sumpah. Alah, seminggu tak hisap takde matinye. Kalau mati nanti, abang pesan kat orang yang tanam tu untuk letak sekali rokok kesayangan awak tu dalam lubang kubur awak." Abang Mukrim berseloroh. Pelajar lain ketawa terkekeh-kekeh mendengarnya. Ibrahim turut tertawa. Rashid mencebikkan muka.

"Abang, boleh tak Fie nak call mak Fie dulu. Seminggu takde handphone ni, risau pulak dia nanti." Seorang pelajar perempuan bersuara. Sofia Afirah nama diberi. Lebih mesra dengan panggilan Fie. Kelihatan agak manja dalam berbicara.

"Hah, boleh-boleh..telefon mak korang, pesan jangan sedih-sedih. Seminggu je korang off hanphone. Korang pun takkan nak cerita semua kat parent korang kan? Ada orang tu nak pergi tandas cerita, nak makan cerita, semua nak cerita. Balik nanti korang ceritalah semuanya sekali."

'Ish, perempuan ni, kenapalah dia cakap dengan nada macam tu. Cakap nada biasa-biasa sudahla. Muka pun boleh tahan. Sure dah ada balak nih. Astaghfirullah! Apa yang aku fikir ni? Dahla pandang dia lama pulak tadi. Ya-Allah, peliharalah hatiku.' Hati kecil Ibrahim terdetik. Dia mengakui, kisah silamnya banyak mempengaruhi dirinya. Dia pernah bercinta dahulu kerana tertarik dengan seseorang yang mempunyai daya tarikan seperti Fie. Walaupun ia hanya tinggal sejarah, namun karat jahiliyyahnya masih berberbaki dan perlu terus dikikis.

"Okey, kalau semua dah serahkan barang-barang, kamu semua boleh pergi ke Dining Hall untuk lunch. Tinggalkan beg pakaian di sini. Lepas makan boleh balik ke dorm masing-masing. Lelaki di dorm Tahan dan perempuan di Dorm Irau.Tapi sebelum tu, pastikan korang buat checkup untuk H1N1. Jangan tak check, mana tahu ada di antara kamu ni pembawa virus! Nanti habis satu school ni kena kuarantin. Kita akan berkumpul semula di sini pukul 4.30 pm untuk Opening Ceremony. Ada apa-apa soalan?"

"Bang, dorm kami kat mana?" Ibrahim bersuara.

"Tu kat atas sana. Dorm Tahan yang paling tinggi tu," ujar Abang mukrim sambil menundingkan jarinya ke atas bukit yang terletak di timur laut dewan.

"Waah..tingginya!" Mereka sekumpulan hampir menjerit serentak. Tempat kediaman itu memang sangat tinggi. Mungkin 30 meter dari paras laut. Untuk sampai ke atas perlu menapak, satu-satunya cara yang ada. 7 hari yang bakal dihadapi tergambar amat melelahkan.



Ternganga mereka tidak lama. Perut yang lapar lebih merunsingkan. Mereka pun beramai-ramai bergerak menuju ke Dewan Makan ataupun Dining Hall. Satu watch akan duduk makan bersama. Dua meja panjang yang digabungkan. Mereka duduk di atas bangku panjang menanti makanan dihidangkan. Untuk hari pertama mereka semua diminta untuk melakukan 'Silence Moment', atau upacara berdoa. Bagi yang bukan beragama Islam, dipersilakan mengikut kepercayaan masing-masing.

Ibrahim mengambil tempat di sebelah Rashid.

'Cuba aku borak-borak sikit dengan dia ni. Mungkin boleh buat kawan. Mana tahu dia ni ada potensi untuk ditarbiyah.' Ibrahim menanam tekad.

"Assalamu'alaikum. Kau ni batch mana ye? Tak pernah tengok muka kau ni. Mesti kau batch Julai kan? Nama aku Ibrahim. Kau panggil je Im. Nama kau siapa?"

"Wa'alaikum salam. Haah, aku batch Julai la. Nama aku Rashid. Aku pun tak pernah tengok muka kau. Kau sekolah kat mana dulu?"

"Aku SMAP Labu, Negeri Sembilan. Kawan aku ada yang sama batch dengan kau. Kau mesti kenal Jamal kan? orang panggil dia Jemmol."

"Ha..kenal-kenal. Kitorang geng kut. Aku ni jiran kau la, SASER."

"La, ye ke..tak sangka. Patut muka macam budak Sains Seremban!"

"Ada la pulak muka budak SASER?"

"Ye la, dari rambut kau aku dah tau, memang kurang mandi. SASER kan selalu takde air. Haha..aku gurau je."

"Ceh kau. Kutuk sekolah aku ye. Tapi memang SASER selalu takde air. Kadang-kadang aku pergi tandas sekolah nak mandi. Tapi mandi tetap mandi. Kat SASER takde kambing."

"Haha..ko ni kelakar la. Em, ko nampak happy je? Tak risau dah pasal rokok kau tu?"

"Huisyh, mana tak risau beb. Tangan aku dah menggeletar ni. Ni lepas makan ni aku rasa nak hisap sebatang, tapi mamat tu dah ambik semua stok aku la pulak. Aku rasa nak deal sikit la dengan dia. Mana tau leh dapat sebatang dua. Dia nampak macam sempoi je."

"Sabarla Rashid. Seminggu je. Bukan setahun. Puasa kan leh tahan sebulan."

"Sebulan tu siang je. Malam leh hisap balik. Tak la tekanan sangat aku. Kau tau Im, aku dulu siap buka puasa hisap rokok tu. Kemaruk gile."

'Ni dah lebih dia nih. Bangga sangat dengan rokok dia.' Ibrahim sudah mula rimas.

"Best sangat ke hisap rokok ni? Bukan busuk ke? Lepas hisap batuk-batuk pulak. Duit pun habis."

"Kau tak tahu. Kena cuba dulu, baru tahu. Ko pernah hisap?"

"Aku belum lagi. Tapi kawan-kawan aku dulu ada ajak. Mula-mula macam nak gak. Tapi aku teringat 3 benda je, terus tak jadi."

"Hah, apa?"

"Satu, kalau aku hisap, nanti ketagih, susah nak tinggal. Habislah duit aku nak beli rokok. Beli, lepas tu bakar, macam bakar duit je kan? Membazir. Membazir tu kan kawan syaitan. Dua, nanti dah tua aku tak sanggup nak kena kanser paru-paru. Sayang aku dengan badan kecil aku ni. Baikla aku mati cara mulia sikit. Huhu.. Tiga, orang selalu kata, hisap rokok ni tak haram, makruh je. Walaupun ada pendapat yang kata haram. Tapi aku ambil jalan selamat je. Mana tahu nanti kat akhirat Allah kata haram, aku insya-Allah terlepas. Tapi depends pada orang la. Aku sampai bila-bila, takkan hisap kut."

Rashid memandang Ibrahim dengan mengerutkan kening. Terdiam.

'Direct sangat ke ayat aku tadi? Harap-haraplah dia tak ambil hati.'

Ibrahim berfikir sendirian. Tidak lama kemudian makanan terhidang. Sambil makan mereka terus berbual mesra. Rashid kelihatan tidak mengambil hati. Ibrahim cuba menukar topik perbualan ke mana-mana. Sesekali dia menegur teman-teman sekumpulan yang lain, bertanya nama dan asal usul. Dia cuba sedaya upaya menjadi seramah mungkin. Namun dalam hatinya masih risau akan penerimaan Rashid. Yalah, luka di tangan, nampak darahnya, luka di hati siapa yang tahu? Terbakar di kampung, nampak asapnya, terbakar di hati, siapa yang tahu?



bersambung...

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Bas bergerak laju. Semua penumpang sedang melayan diri sendiri. Ada yang berborak-borak. Ada yang sedang 'menghimpun daya' (tidur laa). Ada yang sedang membaca majalah dan ada juga yang sedang asyik melayan musik daripada MP3nya. Namun di suatu sudut, ada dua penumpang yang beraktiviti lain daripada yang lain. Mereka sedang membaca Al-Quran. Mereka memang sudah terbiasa melazimkan diri agar setiap saat yang dilalui akan cuba terpenuhi dengan perkara yang berfaedah, yang insya-Allah boleh meningkatkan tahap keimanan mereka.

"Agak-agak macam mana la kat sana nanti ye? Leh ke kita survive akh?"

"Alah, boleh punya. Aktiviti dia kayak dan whaling jer. Minggu lepas masa mukhoyyam kan kita dah berlatih berakit dari pagi sampai petang. Siap sunburn lagi. Sure senang je nanti."

"Kalau setakat aktiviti fizikal tu ana tak kesah pun. Nak sunburn ke, patah tangan ke, sakit sendi ke, semua tu boleh baik nanti."

"Habis tu?"



"Masa mukhoyyam minggu lepas kita semua lelaki, alhamdulillah dah tarbiyah dan faham Islam. Apa yang kita buat tu insya-Allah lebih menaikkan tahap keimanan kita. Ukhuwah pun dapat dieratkan. Tapi kat OBS ni campur lelaki perempuan. Orang-orang umum pulak tu. Leh ke iman kita survive?"

"Ana faham apa yang antum maksudkan. Betul tu. Bukan senang nak jaga batas-batas pergaulan bila dah ramai-ramai macam tu. Ikhtilat akan berlaku. Memang susah kita nak jaga. Pulak tu, ikhwah yang ikut tarbiyah yang ada kali ni cuma ana dan antum je. Tapi akhi, cuba lihat dari luar kotak, apa orang minang kata, out off box."

"Orang minang ape ni akh.."

"Hahaha..Ye la, omputeh la. Ala antum ni, macam tak biasa pulak dengan ana."

"Ok,ok, maksud antum, kita cuba pandang daripada sudut yang positif ke? Anggap program ni sebagai medan untuk kita mempraktikkan apa yang kita pelajari selama ini la?"

"Hah, pandaipun ikhwah ana seorang ni. Jangan asyik-asyik fikir yang buruk-buruk je. Selama ni kita berada dalam 'comfort zone'. Satu rumah kita semuanya ikhwah. Pagi-pagi ada orang boleh kejutkan tahajjud. Solat subuh boleh sama-sama ke masjid naik kereta ana. Bila kita mula nak buat benda-benda mengarut dan tak berfaedah, ada ikhwah yang akan ingatkan. Suasana yang ada memang dibina bagi kita membentuk peribadi muslim yang diidamkan. Tapi bila kat luar, bila kita bersendirian, itulah masanya kita akan menunjukkan peribadi kita yang sebenar. Bolehkah kita tetap mengekalkan prinsip-prinsip Islam yang kita perjuangkan selama ini. Jadilah benih yang baik, dicampakkan ke tanah menjadi kereta, dicampak ke laut menjadi kapal selam, dicampak ke udara menjadi jet pejuang."

"Dah, mula dah perumpamaan pelik die ni. Tapi ana paham maksud antum, kita biar ke mana pun kita pergi, kita perlu membawa prinsip diri yang jelas, kan? Biar kita yang merubah suasana, jangan suasana yang merubah kita. Tapi ana masih risau. Antum pun tau kan, ana ni dulu macam mana. Ana ni mudah excited. Bila excited, habis semua perangai lama keluar. Ana risau ana akan jadi fitnah bagi ikhwah-ikhwah lain. Orang akan pandang serong bagi orang-orang yang berdakwah."

"Tenang akhi, cool...ape orang kampung ana kata, relax...haha.. Kita belum sampai pun lagi antum dah fikir macam-macam. Sekarang ni, selalu ingat, siapa kita sebenarnya. Ke mana pun kita pergi, kita ada misi dan visi yang jelas. Kita nak bawa perubahan dalam masyarakat. So, kat sana nanti, selalu fikir, macam mana kita nak sampaikan mesej Islam kepada mereka. Insya-Allah kita akan selalu dijaga oleh Allah. Ingat Allah selalu. Ok la ye akh, ana nak habiskan sikit lagi ni. Takut kat sana nanti program pack. Nanti berhutang pulak bacaan Al-Quran kita. Penat nak qada'. Antum dah habis ke?"

"Belum. Ok lah, ana pun nak sambung baca ni. Jazakallah atas nasihat akh."

Bas terus melaju menuju ke tempat program. Keresahan Ibrahim mulai berkurang setelah berbual dengan Syazwan. Begitulah lazimnya mereka, saling ingat-memperingati.

Dan tetaplah memberi peringatan, karena sesungguhnya peringatan itu bermanfaat bagi orang-orang yang beriman.
[Adz-Zaariyaat, 51:55]

******

Bas tiba di tapak program tepat jam 1 petang. Tengah hari sabtu itu amat panas. Kelihatan para pelajar menurunkan beg-beg daripada bas sambil mengipas-ngipas diri dengan majalah dan surat khabar yang ada di tangan. Tempat-tempat teduh segera ditujui bagi mengelakkan diri dibakar sinar matahari.

"Semua pelajar sila pergi ke dewan kayu sekarang!" Tiba-tiba satu suara memecahkan keheningan suasana.

Semua pelajar menuju ke dewan kayu sambil menggalas beg masing-masing. Ibrahim dan Syazwan tidak terkecuali. Di dalam dewan itu mereka diarahkan untuk mengambil tempat di atas bangku panjang yang berketinggian berbeza. Beg diletakkan di suatu sudut dewan.

"Akhi, ana harap kita dapat dalam 1 kumpulan. Nanti senang antum nak ingatkan ana."

"Insya-Allah. Semoga Allah mempermudah. Banyakkan berzikir Im"

Seorang lelaki berumur kira-kira 30-an maju ke hadapan para pelajar. Dia mengambil mikrofon dan kemudian membuat ucapan.

"Assalamualaikum dan selamat tengah hari. Selamat datang ke Outward Bound School ataupun OBS. Saya adalah Ramzan, ketua pelatih di sini. Kamu boleh panggil saya Abang Ramzan. Mereka semua yang berbaju kemeja di hadapan kamu ini adalah para pelatih yang akan membimbing kamu sepanjang program di sini. Harap kamu semua dapat memberikan kerjasama yang baik kepada mereka." Katanya sambil menunding ke arah barisan pelatih yang berkemeja biru, mungkin pakaian seragam pelatih di situ.

"Kamu semua beruntung kerana dapat datang ke sini. Di sini kamu akan dilatih untuk membina ketahanan mental dan fizikal di samping meningkatkan kebolehan kamu berinteraksi dan pergaulan di antara kamu. Kamu akan bekerjasama secara berkumpulan untuk menghadapi semua aktiviti yang dijalankan. Oleh itu, saya harap kamu dapat buka minda luas-luas dan nikmatilah program ini dengan penuh semangat. Lupakan semua masalah yang membelenggu. Enjoy!"

'Betul jugak tu. Baik aku enjoy je kat sini. Tak payah tension-tension sangat. Insya-Allah semua akan ok,' Ibrahim berkira-kira sendiri.

"Baik, sekarang kita akan bahagikan kumpulan. Siapa yang dipanggil nama sila ikut pelatih masing-masing."

Semua pelajar dibahagi kepada 7 kumpulan yang dipanggil watch. Setiap watch terdiri daripada 14-15 orang. Lelaki dan perempuan disekalikan dalam satu kumpulan. Hasrat Ibrahim dan Syazwan untuk duduk sekumpulan tidak tercapai. Ibrahim ditempatkan dalam watch Tahan manakala Syazwan dalam watch Trusmadi. Mereka akan menjalani program secara berasingan, kerana Trusmadi dan Tahan berada dalam kumpulan besar yang berbeza. Trusmadi, Beremban dan Gading berada dalam Group 1 manakala Tahan, Ledang, Ulu Sepat dan Jerai Group 2. Ibrahim akan bersendirian mengharungi segalanya.



bersambung...

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As a follow-up to my previous post on my talk for fbFund at Facebook, there was enough interest in watching video of the talk that I have finally uploaded it using Apple's MobileMe. There are three sizes of video available here; I've embedded the medium quality below. Because the Flip was set at a bad angle, you can't see the slides too well. I've embedded them via slideshare below the video, so you can follow along at home, if you'd like.

Edit: I finally got YouTube upload working, which has better embedding options than MobileMe. If you want to see the original video, use the link above.




Slides are below:

The Lean Startup fbFund Edition

View more documents from Eric Ries.

Before I close, let me quote just one additional bit of twitter feedback from one of the video beta-testers:

bmeschke: @ericries This is such GREAT information. A lot of it i have heard before, but your presentation is so clear. http://bit.ly/IMorB

bmeschke: @ericries @KhuramMalik has been trying to convince me of ur pov and i saw the value, but ur 2 startups example really gives in perspective.

I really value feedback like this; it keeps me going when I have doubts. I worry sometimes about making this blog too much into a travelogue or journal of my public events. My goal is to make everything I post here a substantive contribution to the larger entrepreneurship discussion; I hope to live up to that more often than not. As always, I welcome your feedback. If you have thoughts about the right balance of news, events, and commentary, feel free to leave it as a comment or drop me an email. I truly appreciate your support.

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"Akh, ana dah tak tahan lagi. Ana rasa tak ada guna lagi kita teruskan buat kerja ni. Dakwah kita tak mungkin boleh hidup!"

"Astaghfirullah..Akhi, istighfar akhi. Tak elok cakap macam tu."

"Afwan, ana terlalu mengikut perasaan. Tapi ana dah tak tahan. Berapa tahun dah kita meneruskan perjuangan ni. Kita tetap berteguh dengan prinsip kita, tidak punya nama, tidak punya platform khas. Kita terus dengan cara dakwah kita, dengan tarbiyah. Kita tidak pernah memperkenalkan jemaah, tetapi memperkenalkan Islam kepada mad'u-mad'u kita. Namun apa masyarakat kampus ni buat pada kita? Kita dituduh sesat, siapa yang ikut kita scholar akan ditarik, kita underground, kita memecahbelahkan jemaah, dan macam-macam lagi, ana tak laratlah nak sebut. Kalau setakat fitnah-fitnah liar tu saja ana tak kesah, tapi tengok, anak halaqoh ana dah taknak ikut halaqoh lagi. Daripada 35 orang yang kita kumpul, habis semua lari. Adalah yang tinggal 5 orang je. Penat kita tarbiyah mereka, sekarang hilang entah ke mana."

"......"

"Bukan tu je. Sekolah-sekolah yang kita masuk untuk pelajar-pelajarnya kita tarbiyah, pun tak guna juga. Kita turun sekolah tiap-tiap minggu, tapi ada saja alasan mereka tak mahu turun halaqoh. Nak basuh baju lah, nak outing la, balik rumah la. Akh, ana dah tak larat akh. Boleh ke dakwah kita ni maju suatu hari nanti? Macam tak mungkin je. Ana dah putus harap."




"Akhi, bawa bertenang. Jangan ikutkan perasaan tu. Memang lumrah berdakwah, kita akan ditimpa kesusahan dan kemelaratan. Mengharapkan senang dalam berjuang tu kan bagai mengharapkan bulan di siang hari. Antum tak ingat ke lagu kumpulan Hijjaz yang antum selalu nyanyi tu?"

"Ye la, kita memang tak mengharap senang, tapi bukanlah susah macam ni yang kita minta."

"Akh, rileks dulu akh. Ini semua kan ujian daripada Allah. Jangan mengeluh, tapi anggap ni semua tarbiyah daripada Allah untuk kita semakin tabah dan kreatif!"

"Kreatif?"

"Kreatif, ya kreatif! Kita perlu sabar dan seterusnya menganggap segala kesusahan yang kita alami ini adalah cabaran yang perlu kita atasi bagi mewujudkan dakwah yang jauh lebih baik. Mungkin sekarang ni kita masih belum menemukan rentak. Dakwah kita masih belum dapat diterima oleh semua lapisan. Makanya kita perlu merangka strategi-strategi yang lebih kemas dan cantik untuk mengatasi segala masalah yang ada. Baik di kampus ini mahupun di sekolah-sekolah yang kita masuk."

"Erm..."

"Akhi, ana kagum dengan pelajar-pelajar susah dalam Filem Laskar Pelangi. Antum dah tengok filem tu?"

"Belum, cerita apa tu?"

"Antum kena tengok akh. Filem tu menceritakan tentang kesusahan 10 orang anak-anak Pulau Belitung, sebuah pulau miskin yang berjuang untuk meneruskan persekolahan. Sekolah mereka adalah satu-satunya sekolah percuma untuk orang miskin yang ada di pulau itu dan keadaan sekolahnya amatlah uzur. Atapnya zink berkarat yang berlubang-lubang di sana sini. Bila hujan lebat, habis lumpur masuk dan mereka terpaksa bergotong-royang membersihkan kelas mereka bersama-sama. Kalau kapur habis, mereka sendiri yang perlu bebasikal pergi ke bandar yang jauhnya berbelas kilometer dari sekolah. Guru yang mengajarnya pun 3 orang sahaja. Namun mereka tetap bersemangat untuk meneruskan perjuangan untuk menuntut ilmu. Kalau antum tonton filem tu, tentu semangat antum akan tebakar melihat keteguhan dan kegigihan guru-guru dan anak muridnya untuk terus memastikan mereka tetap mempunyai impian. Impian untuk berjaya."


"Macam best je, cerita lah lagi."

"Bab cerita-cerita ni memang antum suka kan? Tapi kalau ana cerita jadi tak best la. Antum kena tengok sendiri cerita tu, baru best. Apa orang melanau kata..baru ada umph!"

"Haha..kelakarla antum ni. Alah, nak tengok cerita tu bila, kita dahla nak dekat exam. Nak study lagi. Antum ceritala sikit, part-part yang syok."

"Yelah...dah buat muka sposen dia. Ok. Asalnya 3 orang mengajar di sekolah tu, tapi seorang telah menarik diri sebab tak tahan dengan gaji yang sedikit dan telah mendapat tawaran daripada sekolah lain. Cikgu lelaki tu namanya Bakri. Bu Muslimah, yang satu-satunya guru perempuan di situ, berkata,

"Jadi kau tega untuk meninggalkan sekolah ini?" Cikgu Bakri terdiam, lalu Bu Muslimah menyambung.
"Bakri, tugas kita memanglah berat. Murid kita pun sedikit. Tapi kita punya kewajiban untuk memberi pendidikan kepada anak-anak yang tidak mampu ni."


Cikgu Bakri pun bersuara,


"Mus, orang-orang sudah tidak ada lagi yang mahu menyekolahkan anak-anaknya di sekolah ini. Mereka fikir lebih anaknya jadi kuli, untuk menafkahi keluarganya."


"Tapi ini satu-satunya sekolah Islam yang ada di Belitung."


"Pernah kauterfikir mengapa satu-satunya Mus? Kerana tidak ada lagi yang peduli Mus. Dah 5 tahun sekolah ini tidak dapat membuka kelas baru kerana apa Mus? Tidak ada lagi murid yang mendaftar. Mengapa Mus? Apa lagi yang perlu dibanggakan, selain namanya SD Muhammadiah? Apa perestasi sekolah ni Mus? Tiada lagi yang kisah. Tiada lagi yang percaya. Tiada lagi yang bermimpi anaknya boleh mencapai impian untuk berjaya. Tiada gunanya kita terus mempertahankan sekolah ini."


Pak Harfan, seorang guru tua merangkap Guru Besar SD Muhammadiah yang semenjak tadi berdiam diri pun bersuara,


"Bakri, Muslimah tidak mungkin mampu mengajarkan semua matapelajaran itu sendirian. Anak-anak itu sebentar lagi sudah masuk darjah enam. Tidak mahukah kau bersabar dan menemani mereka hingga mereka lulus. Tunggulah sebentar saja lagi."


"Ya, tapi tawaran ke sekolah itu pun tidak bisa tunggu pak."


Bu Muslimah terdiam, dan menangis lalu keluar daripada bilik guru meninggalkan Cikgu Bakar dan . Pak Harfan pun pergi mendapatkan Bu Muslimah dan memujuknya,


"Mus, jangan marah. Bersabarlah dulu."


"Tak pak, aku tak marah. Aku merasa ada benarnya apa yang disebut Bakri. Tiada orang yang peduli dengan sekolah kita pak. Semua orang tidak percaya bahawa anak-anak miskin pun punya hak untuk belajar."


"Bukan semua Mus. Masih ada kita berdua. Kita tidak boleh putus asa. Tugas kita adalah terus menyakini anak-anak ini bahawa mereka harus berani mempunyai cita-cita. Berani mempunyai impian."


"Ya pak, benar. Kita harus berusaha lebih keras lagi pak. Kita perlu membuktikan kepada semua orang. Biar semua orang percaya, bahawa sekolah ini ada, dan sekolah ini layak untuk dipertahankan. Kita berdua perlu bekerja lebih keras lagi pak. Lebih keras lagi."

"Hah, itulah keteguhan dua orang guru mereka. Mereka tidak pernah putus asa. Biarpun tiada lagi yang percaya bahawa sekolah itu tidak mampu bertahan, tetapi mereka tetap terus berteguh."

"Erm, best betul antum cerita. Macam dengar drama dari radio! Siap ingat dialog lagi."

"Hahaha, tengoklah berapa kali ana khatam tengok cerita tu. Ramai lagi ikhwah yang hafal dialog cerita tu. Kalau orang ramai hafal dialog cerita P. Ramlee, kita pula hafal dialog cerita islamik macam ni. Barulah terserlah aura tarbiyah!"


"Hmm, ada lagi ke part best?"

"Ada. Kesusahan mereka bukan setakat itu sahaja. Tidak lama kemudian, Pak Harfan meninggal dunia. Tinggallah Bu Muslimah sahaja yang mengajar di sana. Pada awalnya Bu Muslimah sudah berputus asa. Seminggu dia tidak pergi mengajar."

"Habis tu macam mana dengan 10 orang anak-anak miskin tu?"

"Cuba jangan menyampuk. Bagilah ana habis dulu. Ha..ini yang ana kagum ni. Dalam seminggu tu, semua pelajar-pelajar tu tetap hadir ke sekolah. Mereka tetap setia menunggu kehadiran guru mereka yang tercinta, Bu Muslimah. Namun mereka akhirnya tidak lagi ke sekolah kerana menyangka sekolah tidak akan diteruskan lagi. Tinggallah dua orang pelajar sahaja yang masih tetap ke sekolah. Lintang, si anak nelayan dan kawannya Ikal. Mereka tetap ke sekolah walaupun cuma berdua, mengharapkan kembalinya Bu Muslimah. Suatu hari, Ketika Lintang sedang asyik membaca, tiba-tiba Ikal mendengus lalu meluru keluar. Lintang menahannya.

"Mahu ke mana kau Kal?


"Apa lagi nak ditunggu Lintang? Bu Mus tak ada. Kawan-kawan mana? Sekolah apa ini tak ada guru tak ada murid?"


Lintang pun bangun menghampiri Ikal lalu berkata,


"Ayuh, ikut aku."


Mereka berjalan keluar daripada bilik darjah. Lintang bersuara,


"Kal, ayah aku ada empat orang anak. 3 perempuan, aku satu-satunya anak lelaki paling tua. Sepatutnya aku diajak jadi nelayan bersamanya, agar dapat ikan lebih banyak. Tapi, dia malah mengirim aku ke sini. Dia ingin aku mengejar cita-cita yang tinggi Kal. Kita semua harus punya cita-cita. Dan di sekolah inilah perjalanan itu kita mulai. Kita harus terus sekolah."


Lalu mereka berdua pun bersama-sama berbasikal keliling kampung mencari rakan-rakan sekelas untuk belajar bersama-sama. Lalu mereka berkumpul di dalam kelas usang itu tanpa Bu Muslimah. Lintang yang mengajar. Lintang merupakan anak yang cerdas. Lintang mengingatkan mereka supaya tidak berputus asa.


"Soekarno ditahan di Penjara Sukamiskin pada tanggal 29 Disember 1929, kerana menubuhkan parti Nasional Indonesia dengan tujuan Indonesia merdeka. Ruangannya sempit, dikelilingi tembok-tembok tebal yang seram, tinggi, gelap dan berjeriji. Lebih buruk daripada kelas kita yang sering bocor. Tetapi di situlah beliau menjalani hukuman. Setiap hari belajar. Setiap hari baca buku. Beliau adalah salah satu orang tercerdas yang pernah dimiliki oleh negeri ini."


Lalu ketika sedang sibuk mengajar, tiba-tiba Bu Muslimah muncul. Dia amat terharu dengan kesungguhan anak-anak murid kesayangannya yang masih mahu belajar. Ketika dia masuk ke kelas, semua anak-anak muridnya menyerbu dan memeluknya dengan penuh kasih sayang. Mereka semua menangis keharuan."

"Wa...bestnye..ana nak tengok gakla. Banyak pengajaran daripada cerita tu.."

"Jadi, kita perlu mencontohi semangat mereka. Biar semua orang tidak percaya dengan dakwah kita. Biar semua orang lari meninggalkan kita, biar apa alasan yang mereka semua beri, kita ni 'illegal'lah, kita ni 'underground'lah, kita ni 'tak ada ulama' lah, kita ni 'sikit'lah dan apa-apa pun. Biar. Tetapi kita akan tetap yakin akh, intanshurullah, yanshurkum! Jika kamu membantu Allah, Allah akan membantumu. Itulah yang Allah firmankan dalam Surah Muhammad, ayat ke 7. Itu janji Allah, kepada mereka yang membantu agamanya. Ya, sekarang memang kita underground, kita sedikit, sebab kita pun masih baru, masih muda. Tetapi ingat, tidak selamanya kita begini. Tidak selamanya kita akan terus berdakwah tanpa platform seperti ini. Suatu masa nanti kita akan jadi besar, semakin ramai ikhwah yang akan ditarbiyah semakin banyak sekolah yang akan kita masuk dan semakin ramai orang akan menerima dakwah kita. Masa tu lihatlah, kita akan membawa perubahan dalam masyarakat. Kita akan suburkan Malaysia tercinta ini dengan dakwah dan jihad. Kita akan lihat di mana-mana, Islam akan dijulang tinggi dan menjadi cara hidup. Nanti antum akan lihat, ikhwah-ikhwah kita yang sekarang berada di Mesir yang ambil medic, akan balik, buka klinik dan farmasi, lepas itu mereka akan buka rangkaian klinik dan kita akan ada sebuah hospital kita sendiri. Kita akan pastikan semuanya berjalan dengan cukup islamik, tetapi amat professional. Kita akan asingkan lelaki dan perempuannya. Para ibu yang akan bersalin, anaknya tidak lagi akan disambut oleh doktor bukan Islam, tetapi oleh seorang doktor perempuan yang bertudung labuh, seorang akhwat!"

"Haha, betul tu. Kemudian kita yang ambil engineering ni pula akan bantu untuk menjadikan hospital kita adalah yang terbaik dan tercanggih kemudahannya. Kita tidak akan meminta bayaran yang mahal kepada mereka yang tidak mampu. Kita akan memberi kepada masyarakat kita yang terbaik. Macam tu kan akh?"

"Ya, macam tu lah. Kita perlu bercita-cita besar dan berimpian tinggi melangit. Kita perlu berfikir 10-20 tahun ke hadapan. Kita tidak hanya berimpian, tetapi kita susuli dengan strategi-strategi yang mantap dan kemas. Kita mulakan dengan kampus ini. Kita susun rancangan, bagaimana kita nak memastikan lebih ramai mad'u yang dapat kita halaqohkan dan tarbiyah dengan baik. Kita juga akan merancang macam mana agar semua mad'u-mad'u kita di kampus ini akan boleh menjadi da'i yang hebat, lebih hebat dari kita. Sehingga nanti semua orang dapat merasakan nikmat tarbiyah. Semua orang akan berislam dan beriman dengan baik. Sampai masanya nanti, semua kelab dan persatuan serta jabatan-jabatan yang ada di kampus ini akan dipenuhi oleh ikhwah dan akhwat. Ketika itu kita tidak lagi underground. Kita tidak lagi illegal. Kitalah yang akan merubah semuanya. Pergi mana-mana, semuanya ikhwah dan akhwat. Sampaikan pakcik yang tengah potong rumput tu pun nanti, tengah rehat-rehat, tiba-tiba akan keluarkan Al-Quran membacanya. Tengok makcik cleaning servis.."

"Hah, ana tahu, yang tengah mop lantai tu, semuanya nanti bertudung labuh dan berjubah!"

"Hahaha...boleh tahan gak imaginasi antum ni ye. Ana ingat ana seorang je yang suka berimaginasi macam ni."

"Dah jadi roomate antum, tersibghahlah ana! Haha... Tapi kan akh, macam tinggi sangat je cita-cita kita ni, mampu ke nak capai?"

"Akh, nabi pun dulu berdakwah mula dengan underground. Tiada siapa tahu dakwah nabi dan para sahabat. Fitnah yang mereka alami pun jauh lebih dahsyat. Orang ramai hampir tiada yang mengenali baginda, tetapi hampir semua orang dah dengar yang nabi tu gilalah, sesatlah, memecah-belahkan keluargalah, menghina tuhan-tuhan masyarakat arablah. Sampaikan semua orang memusuhi nabi. Tapi dengan berkat kesabaran baginda, akhirnya Negara Islam pertama dapat tertegak di Madinah. Dan para sahabat serta tabi'in meneruskan perjuangan baginda sehingga dua pertiga dunia ini dikuasai mereka. Alah, lihatlah contoh terdekat kita, ikhwah-ikhwah di Indonesia. Kan dahulunya mereka juga underground dan tiada nama? Berdakwah macam kita juga. Tetapi mereka tetap teguh, bersabar dan terus bersabar. Sekarang mereka dah mula menguasai politik. Kita doakan mereka akan terus membawa perubahan di sana."

"Amiin, insya-Allah. Betul tu akh. Ana jadi bersemangat dengar cerita antum ni."

"Tapi akh, kita kena ingat. Niat mesti terus diikhlaskan, usaha mesti terus dicurahkan, tidak kira apapun yang berlaku."

"Maksud antum?"

"Memang impian-impian kita itu indah, tapi kita perlu bersiap sedia andai kita ditaqdirkan Allah untuk tidak sempat melihat kejayaan dakwah. Mungkin kita berusaha bersungguh-sungguh tapi hasinya hanya dapat dilihat 30-40 tahun lagi, atau dalam masa yang lebih panjang daripada itu. Kita mungkin tidak dapat menikmatinya, tetapi tetaplah teguh, agar generasi kita di masa hadapan akan bangga dengan apa yang kita wariskan. Ana teringat pesan Pak Harfan yang selalu diulang-ulang kepada anak-anak miskin tu,

"Jangan mudah berputus asa. Hiduplah untuk memberi sebanyak-banyaknya, bukan untuk menerima sebanyak-banyaknya."

Kerana Allah membalas pahala atas sebanyak mana yang kita berikan, bukan atas sebanyak mana yang kita dapatkan."

"Bunyi macam Ustaz Hasrizal je, 'Erti hidup pada memberi'. Tapi memang betul akh. Jazakallah atas cerita antum. Dari dulu ana memang suka dengar cerita-cerita antum."

"Ana kan memang pandai bercerita, sebab tu lah ana dapat ajak antum ikut halaqoh dulu, ingat tak? Hahaha..saje je ungkit kisah lama sikit. Bukan nak membangga diri, cuma nak mengenang zaman awal tarbiyah."

"Em, ingat lagi, dulu antum yang selalu ajak ana pergi liqo' Al-Mulk. Ana pula asyik rimas je, sebab liqo' tu lama sangat. Antumlah, banyak sangat cerita. Tapi bila dah dengar, tak jadi nak balik bilik study. Sampailah sekarang ni,ana dah banyak berubah. Jazakallah akh."

"Wa-iyya-kum. Bukan ana yang patut antum berikan terima kasih ini. Tetapi kepada Allah. Dialah yang telah mengaturkan pertemuan kita. Dialah yang telah membuka hati kita semua untuk tertarik kepada Islam. Dialah yang kemudiannya telah menetapkan kita untuk bersaudara dalam satu satu saf, untuk saling kuat-menguatkan dan saling berpesan-pesan kepada kebenaran dan kesabaran."

"Akh, seorang sahabat pernah berkata kepada nabi yang dia menyintai seseorang sahabatnya kan? Lalu antum ingat apa yang Baginda katakan pada sahabat itu?"

"Ingat, nabi suruh dia menyatakan cintanya kepada sahabat tersebut. Kenapa?"

"Oleh itu, dengarkan ini, ana dah lama nak sebut. Antum dah banyak tolong ana untuk ubah diri. Dulu ana ni teruk, banyak buat dosa. Couple. Hisap rokok. Belasah orang. Tapi antum tetap dekati ana. Antum kenalkan ana dengan tarbiyah. Antum selalu kuatkan semangat ana bila ana lemah. Antum selalu nasihatkan ana bila ana silap. Antum tetap tak pernah putus asa. Ana terharu..."

"Akh..."

"Nanti, ana belum habis. Oleh itu saksikanlah..Akhi, ana cintakan antum kerana Allah! Uhibbukumfillah ya Akhi!"

"Ya, akhi, ana pun cintakan Antum kerana Allah. Semoga Allah juga turut mencintai antum kerana antum mencintai ana keranaNya. Semoga kita terus tabah dan tsabat dalam perjuangan ini. Kita akan terus yakin yang kita akan mengubah segalanya."

"Ya akh, insya-Allah"

Kedua ikhwah itupun berpelukan dalam linangan air mata. Air mata cinta dan syukur. Mereka akan bersama mengejar pelangi dakwah, di bawah naungan redha dan cinta Ilahi. Semoga Laskar-Laskar Dakwah ini akan mekar di mana-mana sahaja suatu hari nanti. Insya-Allah…

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Tawassul through the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) and awliyaWhat is the ruling on supplicating Allah through an intermediary (tawassul), such as through the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace), and the (friends of Allah) awliya after their passing away. What is permissible and what is not?How Does One Make Tawassul Through The Prophet (Alihis Salam)?How does one make
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Last week I had a real blast meeting with the companies at the fbFund incubator at Palo Alto. They were kind enough to open the event up to the public, which meant we were seriously stressing the building's HVAC - and I have pictures to prove it:









Thank you all so much!

As usual, I'd like to post the slides and then offer some additional commentary. Since I tried out some new material in this talk, it was especially educational to see the reaction. (Note: there is video from this event, but it's not online yet. I had a flip cam with me, and the organizers captured their own video with a tripod and everything. If you're interested in seeing it, leave a comment and I'll see if I can get it online.)

Without further ado...

The Lean Startup fbFund Edition

View more documents from Eric Ries.

Now for the feedback. Always have to start with a little praise; thank you all so much!

edzschau: Just returned from great prez by @ericries, don't miss him, great presenter, #leanstartup

mashagenzel: Eric Ries live blows the Eric Ries webcast out of the water, a delightful presence #leanstartup

davemcclure: wow: SRO full house @fbFund REV incubator for @EricRies talk on #LeanStartup (164 Hamilton, Palo Alto) http://yfrog.com/11of5mj

Next, here are the key concepts that people seem to have taken away:

manukumar: A startup is a human institution designed to deliver a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty @ericries #leanstartup

It sometimes feels strange to talk to a group of startup founders and try to tell them what a startup is. Yet, I think this definition is too important to leave out. I think it makes explicable why so-called "best practices" that people bring to startups from other contexts fail so miserably. If your practice is not designed to cope with uncertainty, it has no place in a startup - even if your startup is located in government or enterprise.

alasaarela: Eric Ries: the most profitable business you can build is a Ponzi scheme :) LOL #leanstartup

This was a new meme that I'm trying out. We tend to equate startup success with making money, but that is a poor choice. I think we have to raise our sights a little higher; after all, Ponzi schemes make a lot of money, at least until they blow. They don't really create value. The same has been true of an unfortunate number of startups, they manage to generate a lot of hype, raise a lot of money, and sometimes make some of their investors, employees, or founders rich. But did they leave the world a better place than before they existed? Now, I don't think even most dot-com era founders were bad people, I just think traditional startup methods make it too easy to become confused about whether we're creating real progress or not.

bigs: @ericries says Stealth dev is a (undesirable, failure-presaging) customer-free zone. #LeanStartup

Of course, a big enabler of those kinds of mistakes is stealth-mode. Another recent meme that I hope more and more startups will take to heart: "stealth is a customer-free zone." There are rare times when stealth is a good strategy, but it amplifies risks without necessarily improving rewards. Danger, Will Robinson.

davemcclure: amazing concepts on Continuous Development => "Cluster Immune System" @EricRies #LeanStartup @fbFund http://yfrog.com/bf50cj

dalelarson: Because most features take longer to argue and prioritize than to build. -@ericries #leanstartup

Another new idea in the section on continuous deployment and the cluster immune system. Although there is cost and overhead associated with continuous deployment, the benefits are immense. One such benefit is that, when combined with A/B testing, you can try out small features in less than the amount of time it takes to argue or prioritize them. Nothing is more demoralizing to an engineering team. Prioritizing in a vacuum is a leading source of waste.

jellytheory: Ask WHY? 5X when something unexpected happens: behind every tech problem is a human one. #leanstartup

bmorrow: Not just for engineers: ask why 5x every time something unexpected happens. Find and fix the cause, not just symptoms #leanstartup #fbFund

There seemed to be a lot of resonance about Five Whys this time around, and I'm glad to see it becoming part of the discussion, hence yesterday's "How to conduct a Five Whys root cause analysis."

mashagenzel: Absolutely true, "Startups' competitive advantage is being able to go through customer validation loop faster" via @ericries #leanstartup

dalelarson: Progress == validated customer learning. Iterating at whiteboard != progress. #leanstartup

With so many startups in the room, I could see the stricken faces when I started to talk about the fact that most of us founders are pretty good at keeping people busy - but aren't necessarily sure if we're making progress. Getting clear about what constitutes progress is probably the biggest shift in mindset required to build a lean startup. See Validated learning about customers for more info.

biganderson: Visionary (paying) customers: more visionary than founders, bc they live with the problem that fdrs are trying to solve #leanstartup #fbfund

manukumar: Difference between a vision and a delusion is that a vision is grounded in reality/facts. :@ericries #leanstartup

jordym: "3 types of people have reality distortion fields: good startup founders, bad startup founders, and crazy people." - @ericries #leanstartup

jellytheory: At fbFund REV, listening to @ericries: Is your startup based on a delusion or vision? They often get blurred by entrepreneurs! #leanstartup

OK, let's talk about the vision thing. It's so important, and also so dangerous. Being able to convince other people around you (those within the "reality distortion field") is necessary to sustain the passion and energy that a startup needs. But it can also be used for evil - to convince people to abandon their senses and work on something that nobody will ever want. How can we tell the difference? I saw a lot of people stealing glances at someone else in the room while I was talking about this. I've been there: is it me or my cofounder that's crazy? What if it's both of you? Use some customer development to find out.

daphnecarmeli: "if you don't A/B test, features get PRETTIER over time; if u do A/B test they get more EFFECTIVE over time" @ericries #leanstartup @fbfund

And last but certainly not least, I wanted to try out a line that I haven't used in a long time. The power of A/B testing is so under-exploited in product development, that I'm trying new ways to explain its benefits. Remember that we can use split-testing for both the problem team and solution team, and that causes a lot of confusion. Split-testing is great for linear optimization; making our landing pages, conversion rates, and retention metrics incrementally better day-in day-out. But it's also amazing for testing big hypotheses, like what our customers really want to get out of our product. If you're not doing both, you're missing out.

Last, I was really struck by one section of the talk that seems to have been completely ignored: a new section on the power of Small Batches. Given that this is one of the most powerful concepts for building and iterating faster, I'm surprised that it didn't register. So, here's a request: how can I make this punchier, clearer, or just generally better? Any ideas?

Anyway, thanks so much to everyone who came out. I had an incredible time. See you next time.

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In the lean startup workshops, we’ve spent a lot of time discussing the technique of Five Whys. It allows teams to diagnose sources of waste in their development process and continuously improve, reversing the usual trend of teams getting slower over time. With Five Whys, teams can accelerate, even as they scale.

In a previous post, I outlined the benefits of Five Whys: that it allows you to make large investments in infrastructure incrementally, takes advantage of the 80/20 rule to free up resources immediately, and helps organizations become built to learn. Today, I want to talk about the mechanics of Five Whys in greater detail.

First, a caveat. My intention is to describe a full working process, similar to what I’ve seen at IMVU and other lean startups. But as with all process changes, it should not be interpreted as a spec to be implemented right away. In fact, trying too much is just as dangerous at not doing enough. Just as the lean movement has taught us to build incrementally, it has also taught us to attempt process changes incrementally as well. You need to transition to a work flow of small batches – in small batches.

Five Whys involves holding meetings immediately following the resolution of problems the company is facing. These problems can be anything: development mistakes, site outages, marketing program failures, or even internal missed schedules. Any time something unexpected happens, we could do some root cause analysis. Yet it’s helpful to begin by tackling a specific class of problems. For example, a common place to get started is with this rule: any time we have a site outage of any duration, we will hold a post-mortem meeting immediately afterwards.

The first step is to identify three things about the meeting: what problem we are trying to solve, who will run the meeting, and who was affected by the problem. For the problem, it’s essential to hold the meeting immediately following a specific symptom. Five Why’s rarely works for general abstract problems like “our product is buggy” or “our team moves too slow.” Instead, we want to hold it for a specific symptom, like “we missed the Jan 6 deadline by two weeks” or “we had a site outage on Nov 10.” Have faith that if a large general problem is really severe, it will be generating many symptoms that we can use to achieve a general solution.

Always explicitly identify the person running the meeting. Some organizations like to appoint a “Five Whys master” for a specific area of responsibility. For example, at IMVU we had masters appointed for topics like site scalability or unit test failures. The advantage of having an expert run each meeting is that this person can get better and better at helping the team find good solutions. The downside is the extra coordination required to get that person in the room each time. Either way can work. In any event, nobody should hold a master position for too long. Rotation is key to avoid having a situation where one person becomes a bottleneck or single point of failure.

The person running the meeting does not have to be a manager or executive. They do need to have the authority necessary to assign tasks across the organization. That’s because Five Whys will often pierce the illusion of separate departments and discover the human problems that lurk beneath the surface of supposedly technical problems. In order to make Five Whys successful, the person running the meeting has to have the backing of an executive sponsor who has the requisite authority to back them up if they wind up stepping in political landmines. But this executive sponsor doesn’t need to be in the room – what matters is that everyone in the room understands that the person running the meeting has the authority to do so. This means that if you are trying to introduce Five Whys into an organization that is not yet bought-in, you have to start small.

In order to maximize the odds of success, we want to have everyone affected by the problem in the meeting. That means having a representative of every department or function that was affected. When customers are affected, try to have someone who experienced the customer problem first-hand, like the customer service rep who took the calls from angry customers. At a minimum, you have to have the person who discovered the problem. Otherwise, key details are likely to be missed. For example, I have seen many meetings analyzing a problem that took a long time to be diagnosed. In hindsight, the problem was obvious. If the people responsible for diagnosis aren’t in the post-mortem meeting, it’s too easy to conclude, “those people were just too stupid to find the problem” instead of focusing on how our tools could make problems more evident and easier to diagnose.

A root cause analysis meeting has a clear problem, leader, and stakeholders. The most important guideline for the meeting itself is that the purpose of the meeting is to learn and to improve, not to assign blame or to vent. Assume that any problem is preventable and is worth preventing. Problems are caused by insufficiently robust systems rather than individual incompetence. Even in the case of a person making a mistake, we have to ask “why do our tools make that mistake so easy to make?”

The heart of the meeting is the analysis itself. For each problem, we want to ask “why did that happen?” and “why wasn’t it prevented by our process?” We do that iteratively until we have at least five levels of analysis. Of course, the number five is not sacrosanct; it’s just a guideline. What’s critical is that we don’t do too few levels, and we don’t do too many. One hundred whys would be overwhelming. But if we stay stuck at the technical parts of the problem, and never uncover the human problems behind them, we’re not going far enough. So I would keep the meeting going until we’re talking about human problems, and preferably system-level problems. For example, a site outage may seem like it was caused by a bad piece of code, but: why was that code written? Why didn’t the person who wrote it know that it would be harmful? Why didn’t our tests/QA/immune system catch and prevent the problem? Why wasn’t it immediately obvious how to fix the problem?

Pay attention to whether people are comfortable “naming names” in the meeting. If people are afraid of blame, they’ll try to phrase statements in vague, generic terms or use the passive voice, as in “a mistake was made” rather than “So-and-so failed to push the right button.” There’s no easy fix to this problem. Trust takes time to build up, and my experience is that it may take months to establish enough trust that people are confident that there won’t be retribution for speaking up candidly. Stay patient, and be on alert for blame-type talk or for post-meeting revenge. I recommend a zero-tolerance policy for these behaviors – otherwise our Five Whys meetings can descend into Five Blames.

Another common issue is the tendency of root causes to sprout branches. Complex problems rarely have only one cause, and looking for the primary cause is easier in theory than in practice. The branching of causes is also a prime target for so-called “anchor draggers” – people who aren’t really on board with the exercise in the first place. An easy way to derail the meeting is to keep insisting that more and more lateral causes be considered, until the team is running around in circles. Even well intentioned people can wreak the same havoc by simply staying over-focused on technical or ancillary issues. Try to stay focused on just one line of inquiry. Remember, Five Whys is not about making an exhaustive survey of all the problems. It’s about quickly identifying the likely root cause. That’s why it’s more important to do Five Whys frequently than to get it exactly right. It’s a very forgiving practice, because the most wasteful problems will keep clamoring for attention. Have faith that you’ll have many more opportunities to tackle them, and don’t get hung up on any particular solution.

Once you’ve found approximately five levels of the problem, which includes at least one or two human-level issues, it’s time to turn to solutions. The overall plan is to make a proportional investment in each of the five levels. The two major guidelines are: don’t do too much, and don’t do nothing. Almost anything in between will work.

For example, I often cite a real example of a problem that has as its root cause a new employee who was not properly trained. I pick that example on purpose, for two reasons: 1) most of the companies I work with deal with this problem and yet 2) almost none of them have any kind of training program in place for new employees. The reason is simple: setting up a training program is seen as too much work to be justified by the problem. Yet in every situation where I have asked, nobody has been tasked with making a realistic estimate, either of the impact of this lack of training or the real costs of the solution. In fact, even the investigation itself is considered too much work. Five Whys is designed to avoid these nebulous arguments. If new employees are causing problems, that will be a routine topic. If those problems are minor, each time it happens we’ll budget a small amount of time to make progress on the solution.

Let’s imagine the ideal solution would be to spend six weeks setting up a training program for new employees. You can almost hear a manager now: “sure, if you want me to spend the next six weeks setting this up, just let me know. It’s just a matter of priorities. If you think it’s more important than everything else I’m working on, go right ahead and find someone else to take over my other responsibilities…” This logic is airtight, and has the effect of preventing any action. But Five Whys gives us an alternative. If we’ve just analyzed a minor problem that involved a new employee, we should make a minor investment in training. To take an extreme example, let’s say we’ve decided to invest no more than one hour in the solution. Even in that case, we can ask the manager involved to simply spend the first hour of the six-week ideal solution. The next time the problem comes up, we’ll do the next hour, and so on.

In fact, at IMVU, we did exactly that. We started with a simple wiki page with a few bullet points of things that new engineers had tripped over recently. As we kept doing root cause analysis, the list grew. In response to Five Whys that noticed that not all new engineers were reading the list, we expanded it into a new engineer curriculum. Soon, each new engineer was assigned a mentor, and we made it part of the mentor’s job to teach the curriculum. Over time, we also made investments in making it easier to get a new engineer set up with their private sandbox, and even dealt with how to make sure they’d have a machine on their desk when they started. The net effect of all this was to make new engineers incredibly productive right away – in most cases, we’d have them deliver code to production on their very first day. We never set out to build a world-class engineering-training process. Five Whys simply helped us eliminate tons of waste by building one.

Returning to the meeting itself, the person running the meeting should lead the team in brainstorming solutions for each of the problems selected. It’s important that the leader be empowered to pick one and only one solution for each problem, and then assign it to someone to get done. Remember that the cost of the solutions is proportional to the problem caused. This should make it easy to get buy-in from other managers or executives. After all, if it’s a severe problem like a site outage, do they really want to be seen as the person getting in the way of solving it? And if it’s a minor problem, are they really going to object to a few hours of extra work here and there, if it’s towards a good cause? My experience is: usually not.

There are no fixed rules for what constitutes a proportional investment. As teams get experience doing Five Whys, they start to develop rules of thumb for what is reasonable and what isn’t. To restate: the key is that all parties, including the non-technical departments, see the investments as reasonable. As long as we don’t veer to either extreme, the 80/20 rule will make sure that we don’t under-invest over the long term. Remember that if something is a serious problem, it will keep coming up over and over in these meetings. Each time, we’ll get to chip away at it, until it’s no longer a problem.

The last element of a good Five Whys process is to share the results of the analysis widely. I generally recommend sending out the results to the whole company, division, or business unit. This accomplishes two important things: it diffuses knowledge throughout the organization, and it provides evidence that the team in question is taking problems seriously. This latter point can eliminate a lot of waste. I have been amazed how many teams have severe inter-departmental trust issues caused by a lack of communication about problems. For example, engineering feels that they are constantly being pressured to take shortcuts that lower the quality of the product. At the same time, the very marketing people who are applying that pressure think the engineering team doesn’t take quality seriously, and doesn’t respond appropriately when their shoddy work leads to customer problems. Sharing Five Whys can alleviate this problem, by letting everyone know exactly how seriously problems are taken. I say exactly, because it may actually reveal that problems are not taken seriously. In fact, I have seen people in other departments sometimes catch sloppy thinking in a Five Whys report. By sharing the analysis widely, that feedback can flow on a peer-to-peer basis, quickly and easily.

Most organizations are unaware of how much time they spend firefighting, reworking old bugs, and generally expending energy on activities that their customers don’t care about. Yet getting a handle on these sources of waste is hard, especially because they are dynamic. By the time a tops-down company-wide review figured out the main problems, they’d have shifted to another location. Five Whys allows teams to react much faster and then constantly adapt. Without all that waste in their way, they simply go faster.

(If you’re new to Five Whys, I’m eager to hear your feedback. Does this help you get started? What questions or concerns do you have? Leave your thoughts in a comment. If you’ve tried Five Whys, please share your experiences so far. I’ll do my best to help.)

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