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...

Read More »

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.

Read More »

"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…

Read More »

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
Read More »

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.

Read More »

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.)

Read More »

This months host is Mz Kitchen of Madame Chow's Kitchen. (The pictures through out this post are from Lori of Lori's Lipsmacking Goodness and Temperance of High on the Hog.) She is helping us launch our new website and celebrate our 1 yr Aniversary with this great recipe!

According to wikipedia, Beef Wellington "is a preparation of beef tenderloin coated with pâté (often pâté de foie gras) and duxelles, which is then wrapped in puff pastry and baked."

After doing quite a bit of research and experimentation, I put this recipe together. It's based on the Ultimate Beef Wellington by Tyler Florence, but I added a couple things and eliminated a couple others.

What is required: using the puff pastry (I've heard that there are vegan versions on the market, but I haven't found them), a protein, and the duxelles. You don't have to use beef, you can use chicken, or fish. If you're a vegetarian (I was a strict one for over 20 years), I recommend that you use tempeh or seitan as your protein. Why? Because moisture is the enemy here! Even pressed tofu will be too moist, and you will end up with extremely soggy pastry. Ultimately, though, it's up to you what protein you choose for the dish.

Cook the duxelles on low heat so that you have a chance to evaporate the liquid, but so that you don't burn the mushrooms and shallots. If you like your meat rare or medium rare, I suggest keeping the seared beef in the refrigerator until just before you put everything together - it took so long to brown my puff pastry, that the beef was well done. Fortunately, my husband said it was still moist, but using cold beef means that it will take longer to cook, giving your puff pastry the time to brown.

Here is a helpful Gordon Ramsey video. Please note that the recipe below does NOT include the ham that Ramsey is using in the video, but if you like the idea, go for it and use it! You can also make individual servings, but remember that you will have to adjust the cooking time accordingly - try 20 to 25 minutes to start, but be sure to check because cooking time will vary because of the thickness of the meat, the type of meat you are using, your brand of puff pastry, and your oven.

Beef Wellington

For the Duxelles:

3 pints (1 1/2 pounds) white button mushrooms
2 shallots, peeled and roughly chopped
4 cloves garlic, peeled and roughly chopped
2 sprigs fresh thyme, leaves only
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper

For the Beef:

1 (3-pound) center cut beef tenderloin (filet mignon), trimmed
Extra-virgin olive oil
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
6 sprigs of fresh thyme, leaves only
2 tablespoons Dijon mustard
Flour, for rolling out puff pastry
1 pound puff pastry, thawed if using frozen (follow directions on the package)
2 large eggs, lightly beaten
8 ounces mousse pate, available in specialty cheese and appetizer cases of larger markets (optional)

Directions
To make the Duxelles:

Add mushrooms, shallots, garlic, and thyme to a food processor and pulse until finely chopped. Add butter and olive oil to a large saute pan and set over medium heat. Add the shallot and mushroom mixture and saute for 8 to 10 minutes until most of the liquid has evaporated. Season with salt and pepper and set aside to cool completely.

To prepare the beef:

Tie the tenderloin in 4 places so it holds its cylindrical shape while cooking. Drizzle with olive oil, then season with salt and pepper and sear all over, including the ends, in a hot, heavy-based skillet lightly coated with olive oil - about 2 to 3 minutes.

Using a rubber spatula cover evenly with a thin layer of duxelles. Season the surface of the duxelles with salt and pepper and sprinkle with fresh thyme leaves. When the beef is seared, remove from heat, cut off twine and smear lightly all over with Dijon mustard. Allow to cool completely.

I made the duxelles and seared the tenderloin about 10 hours in advance, and refrigerated both of them. It is important that these items are cold because you will be working with puff pastry, and if they're warm, they may cause the dough to melt before you get it in the oven.

About an hour before you plan to serve the Beef Wellington,preheat oven to 425 degrees F.

On a lightly floured surface, roll the puff pastry out to about a 1/4-inch thickness. Depending on the size of your sheets you may have to overlap 2 sheets and press them together.

Spread the duxelles mixture down in a column down the middle of the rolled out puff pastry. Thinly slice the mousse and cover the duxelles with it - every square millimeter doesn't have to be covered, but you're trying to make sure that every serving gets beef, duxelle, and mousse.

Remove beef from refrigerator. Set the beef in the center of the pastry and brush all the edges of the pastry with egg wash. Fold the longer sides over the beef, and seal. Trim ends if necessary then brush with egg wash and fold over to completely seal the beef - saving ends to use as a decoration on top if desired. Place the beef seam side down on a baking sheet.

Brush the top of the pastry with egg wash then make a couple of slits in the top of the pastry using the tip of a paring knife - this creates vents that will allow the steam to escape when cooking. Bake for 40 to 45 minutes until pastry is golden brown and beef registers 125 degrees F (rare) on an instant-read thermometer. Remove from oven and rest before cutting into 3/4-inch thick slices

From the Forums:

It was like the most succulent bite of beef with all the layers of flavor. I am not a big beef fan either. So for me to say this- it means a lot. Lori of Lori's Lipsmacking Goodness

I made this for my husband using a truffle mousse from Whole Foods, and he LOVED it. At first he wasn't sure, but then changed his opinion as he made his way through the dish. Mz Kitchen of Madame Chow's Kitchen

Read More »

I recently agreed to join Facebook's fbFund incubator as a mentor. Part of that includes giving a presentation for the fbFund companies on the lean startup methodology. I just got word that this is going to be happening this coming Thursday, June 25 in Palo Alto (in the former Facebook HQ). Best of all, I got word they are specially opening this event up to you, dear readers. Priority will be given to employees of companies participating in the fbFund REV program, but I am confident that there will be room for members of the general public who want to attend. If you'd like to reserve a spot, please RSVP.

fbFund REV featuring Eric Ries

The Lean Startup

Host:	fbFund
Type:	Education - Lecture
Network:	Global

Date:	Thursday, June 25, 2009
Time:	1:30pm - 3:30pm
Location:	fbFund REV Garage
Street:	164 Hamilton
City/Town:	Palo Alto, CA
RSVP Here

So, if you are in the Bay Area and want to swing by Palo Alto on Thursday afternoon, come join the conversation. As always, if you're a reader, please do say hello.

Read More »

In a lean startup, instead of being organized around traditional functional departments, we use a cross-functional problem team and solution team. Each has its own iterative process: customer development and agile development respectively. And the two teams are joined together into a company-wide feedback loop that allows the whole company to be built to learn. This combination allows startups to increase their odds of success by having more major iterations before they run out of resources. It increases the runway without additional cash.

Increasing iterations is a good thing - unless we're going in a circle. The hardest part of entrepreneurship is to develop the judgment to know when it's time to change direction and when it's time to stay the course. That's why so many lean startup practices are focused on learning to tell the difference between progress and wasted effort. One such practice is to pivot from one vision to the next.

Changing the vision is a hard thing to do, and should not be undertaken lightly. Some startups avoid getting customer feedback for precisely this reason: they are afraid that if early reactions are negative, they'll be "forced" to abandon their vision. That's not the goal of a lean startup. We collect feedback for one reason only: to find out whether our vision is compatible with reality or is a delusion. As Steve writes in the Four Steps to the Epiphany, we always seek to find a market for the product as currently specified, not conduct a focus group to tell us what the spec should be. If and only if we can't find any market for our current vision is it appropriate to change it.

So how do you know it's time to change direction? And how do you pick a new direction? These are challenging questions, among the hardest that an early startup team will have to grapple with. Some startups fail because the founders can't have this conversation - they either blow up when they try, or they fail to change because they are afraid of conflict. Both are lethal outcomes.

I want to introduce the concept of the pivot, the idea that successful startups change directions but stay grounded in what they've learned. They keep one foot in the past and place one foot in a new possible future. Over time, this pivoting may lead them far afield from their original vision, but if you look carefully, you'll be able to detect common threads that link each iteration. By contrast, many unsuccessful startups simply jump outright from one vision to something completely different. These jumps are extremely risky, because they don't leverage the validated learning about customers that came before.

I've spoken in some detail about a specific pivot that we went through at IMVU, when we decided to abandon the instant messaging add-on concept, and switch to a standalone instant messaging network. We went through another pivot when we switched again from instant messaging to social networking. Although I wish I could take credit for these pivots, the reality is that they were not caused by my singular insight or that of my other co-founders. Instead, they were made possible by a process-oriented approach that stimulated our thinking and encouraged us to take prudent risks. More than anything, it forced us to take advantage of necessity, the mother of invention. Here's what it looked like.

IMVU had a roughly two-month-long development cycle. Each cycle was punctuated by a meeting of our Business Advisory Board (BAB). At this meeting, we would present our goals for the cycle, all the raw results we'd managed to collect, and our conclusions about what was next. This created a forum for deep thinking and conflict over the direction of the company - a classic problem team activity. It gave the whole company license to go heads-down building product as fast as possible during the development cycle, acting as a solution team should. We knew we'd have the opportunity to think strategically at least once per cycle, so we could stay focused tactically in the meantime.

When it was time to pivot, there were usually certain signs that we'd look to. The most important one actually came from solution team activities. When your fundamental product hypothesis is wrong, the solution team is going to be chronically frustrated. You can try every kind of experiment, add new features, innovate like crazy, optimize the funnel - and get only modest results. One or two cycles of that kind of frustration and you might be able to blame the solution team for insufficient creativity. But eventually, as the company fails to find traction, you start to ask problem team questions: are we really solving an important problem for customers? Are our early adopters really adopting? And does our product really solve the problem we've promised them?

Ironically, although it's the solution team that is the early-warning system ("canary in the coal mine") for pivots, it's actually hard for the solution team to make the decision to pivot. That's why it's so essential to have a co-equal problem team. The more work you've sunk into a product or vision, the harder it is to let it go. As the CTO/VP Engineering, I was the worst offender. It was incredibly hard for me to throw out working code, especially when it was well-factored, unit tested, and generally brilliant (if I did say so myself). I was stuck between a rock and a hard place. Leading up to a pivot, each cycle, despite our best efforts, the metrics weren't good enough. We didn't believe the problem was that we weren't trying hard enough. But we also didn't want to believe that the work we'd expended so far was a waste. It was painful.

The problem team/solution team combined with the concept of the pivot provides a way out. First of all, remember that each team is cross-functional. That means that I (and other engineers) were able to participate in the problem team discussions. Just wearing a different hat made it easier to consider abandoning our work. Such discussions would have been impossible in our execution-oriented engineering team meetings. Context matters. Providing a full view of all the raw data helped, too. It allowed our advisors to help us see patterns we had missed, zooming out the viewpoint from the trees back to the forest. From that angle, it was easier to accept that our micro problems had macro causes.

The pivot helped even more. The hard part about abandoning work is the feeling of wasted effort, that we'd have been just as well-off if we had spent the past few months on vacation instead of working incredibly hard. By pivoting, we honor all the effort by recognizing that learning would have been impossible without the work of the solution team. And rather than just abandoning all that work, we look for ways to take advantage of it in our new direction.

That's the pattern we see in so many successful startups. They did everything they could to take advantage of what they'd built so far. Most engineers naturally think about repurposing the technology platform, and this is a common pattern. But there are a lot of other possibilities. I'd like to call out three in particular: pivot on customer segment, pivot on customer problem, or pivot on a specific feature.

In a segment pivot, we try to take our existing product and use it to solve a similar problem for a different set of customers. This happens commonly when consumer products get unexpectedly adopted in enterprise, as happened to my friends at PBworks. In those cases, the product may stay mostly the same, but the positioning, marketing, and - most importantly - prioritization of features changes dramatically.

In a customer problem pivot, we try to solve a different problem for the same customer segment. This is an exciting kind of change, usually. When doing intense customer development, the problem team can attain a high level of empathy with potential customers. If the results of that exercise is a realization that customers have a problem that our solution doesn't address, and that problem is more promising - it's time to pivot. Starbucks famously did this pivot when they went from selling coffee beans and espresso makers to brewing drinks in-house. They were still serving high-end coffee afficionados, but in a more convenient form. This paved the way for their crossing-the-chasm type breakthrough with mainstream customers.

In a feature pivot, we select out a specific feature from our current product and reorient the whole company around that. A good example is Paypal realizing that their customers were gravitating to the email-payments part of their original solution, and ignoring the complex PDA-based cryptography solution. In order to do this kind of pivot, you need to pay close attention to what customers are really doing, not what you think they should do. It also requires abandoning the extra features that make it hard for new customers to discover what's really valuable about the new, simplified solution.

Without the tools to pivot well, startups get stuck between two extremes: the living dead, still expending energy but not really making progress, always hoping the next new feature will cause traction to magically materialize, and the compulsive jumper, never picking a single direction long enough to find out if there's anything there. Instead of these dead-ends, use the problem and solution team framework and then: pivot, don't jump.
Read More »

Hello, from Long Lane Honey Bee Farm. We are David & Sheri Burns operating a honey bee farm in Central Illinois. We not only enjoy beekeeping, but it is a passion for us too. We especially enjoy helping more and more people enter the wonderful hobby of beekeeping.

Beekeeping is more than just a few crazy people, wearing funny hats and risking their lives while playing with killer bees. First of all, beekeepers keep gentle bees. For the most part, honey bees are gentle, busy and are not aggressive. We raise queens, and we make sure that the queens we raise are from hives that are not aggressive. Of course the worker bees do have stingers, so proper handling of the bees along with adequate protective clothing is necessary. Beekeeping is a billion dollar industry. Millions of hives are kept by beekeepers across the US.

Because honey bees are becoming scarcer, it is important to educate our local communities on the important role honey bees play in providing us with healthy food through pollination of our crops. Without the honey bee our fruits and vegetables would be at great risk.

Here's a squadron of bees returning to base loaded heavily with nectar. Beyond needing our bees to provide our food, bees are just fun to keep! There is so much to learn and learning is fun. To keep bees and broaden our understanding of the honey bee is a wonderful and very therapeutic past time and hobby.

To help beekeepers enjoy beekeeping even more, we provide these beekeeping lessons, containing our own photos along with important information and advice in being a good beekeeper. If you enjoy these free online beekeeping lessons we encourage you to donate toward these lesson. There is a place at the end of lesson to donate, and we do appreciate it in advance. When considering a donation, think about how much it would cost if you had to purchase books or take a college course that contains all the information in these lessons.

Today, I want to share about keeping a strong queen in your hive.

Lesson 55: HOW TO TELL WHEN YOUR HIVE IS QUEENLESS

Queenlessness is serious. In fact, queenlessness is the single most greatest threat to a hive’s survivability than any other disease or pest. Yet, it is easier to correct and overcome than other pests and diseases. Then why is queenlessness such an issue? In this lesson I want to address several key factors about queenlessness: 1) Why do queens die or disappear? 2) How to determine if your colony is queenless 3) How to make a queenless colony queen right 3) What to look for when your hive is about to become queenless 4) How to determine how long your hive has been queenless 5) What causes a worker to start laying in a queenless hive 6) How to deal with a laying worker 7) Suggestions to help avoid your hive from becoming queenless.

Every hive has only one queen. Her primary role is to lay eggs, sometimes 1,000 – 3,000 a day. Without a prolific queen, the colony will never build up in population and will always lack adequate foragers, thus there will be a constant lack of incoming pollen, nectar and water. The colony will eventually become so weak that it will succumb to pests or diseases.

However, with a young and prolific queen a colony will quickly increase in population and ample supplies of pollen, nectar and water will allow the hive to expand, be productive and resist most common pests and diseases. Therefore, a queen right hive is essential at all times during the year. Queen right is a term used to define a hive that has a prolific queen. As you can see in the picture below of a hive, it is full of bees. We believe that by keeping a hive very crowded, but not congested, a hive remains strong enough to resist most pests and diseases.

Notice how the many bees cover almost all of the frames on top. I removed one frame to inspect and to be sure the queen is laying good. But even hives that are queen right can suddenly become queenless. How does this happen so quickly?

Why do queens die or disappear? Remember, honey bees are livestock. More specifically, bees are bugs, insects that are at great risk not only from the normal threat of nature, but also from the hostile world beyond the sweet clover fields and tranquil meadows. Traffic, pesticides, insecticides, and those who see all insects as a pest pose a great threat to the survival of the honey bee. Because a queen is a small ¾ inch bug, she too can perish for various reasons. She can become ill or old and die. She can accidentally be smashed by the beekeeper when frames are pushed back together or covers are placed on a hive. She can be killed by the other bees if she shows signs of inferiority. And when another queen is raised in the same hive, the queens will fight and only one will survive, but certainly they both can perish in the fight.

A virgin queen must fly out of the hive several times to mate. This mating flight can be very treacherous. She can easily become a tasty meal for a bird or fall victim to nasty weather while she’s out. And even if she does make it back, the question is, did she mate adequately. So even though a hive can successfully raise their own queen, there is no better proof that the colony has a prolific queen until eggs are visible.

How do we determine that our colony is queenless? No eggs. You can click on the images to see a larger version. Study the picture and familiarize yourself in identifying eggs and larvae. An egg stands up in the bottom of a cell. By day three, the egg has laid down on the bottom of a cell and hatched into a larvae. You can see the royal jelly surrounding the larvae in the picture.

Even if a mated queen is present but we see no eggs, we are essentially queenless. You’ll develop a skill that will allow you to open up your hive and listen to the bees and observe their behavior. A queenless hive usually has a louder roar, and usually appears more disorganized. If you do not see any eggs on any frames, then you are queenless.

How can we make a queenless colony queen right? Purchase a new, mated queen in a cage and introduce her to the new hive with a candy plug. Or if the hive is raising their own queen, allow them to do so. If you allow the colony to raise their own queen, you will have to wait longer until the virgin queen emerges, matures, mates and starts laying. If you purchase a mated queen, she will start laying within a few days.

Is there a way we can tell if our colony is about to become queenless? Yes and no. Obviously if the beekeeper smashes and kills the queen, this cannot be known in advance. However, if the current queen has space to lay but is laying poorly, then the colony may try to replace her soon or they may not. Or if you see mostly drone brood, which sticks up above the smooth worker brood more like bullets, then you know your queen will soon perish. Also, if you see queen cells, either swarm cells on the lower part of the frame or supersedure cells on the upper half of the frame, then watch your hive carefully. Something may be wrong and it may become queenless. Finally, if you know the age of your queen, then you can determine how long she has left. This is somewhat unknown because some queens can do real well for several years, maybe three or four years. Some are only good for one year. Therefore, it is best to requeen your colony each year.

When you find that your hive is queenless, it is important to know how long it has been without a queen. This will tell you how long you have to obtain a new queen. For example, if you see only sealed brood as in the picture to the left, you know that your queen has been gone for more than a week. Sealed brood looks different than sealed honey. Sealed brood is usually darker and more textured looking. Whereas sealed honey is brighter and looks more wet. If you need help learning the difference, just use a tooth pick and poke a cell to see what's inside. If you see unsealed larvae, then you have some time before your hive experiences the affects of queenlessness. But you should work promptly to provide a new queen.

The unsealed brood means that those bees will be hatching in about 15 days so you still have new bees on their way. Let me test you. If your queen is missing but you see what's in the photo to the left, how long has your queen been gone? You can click on the image to enlarge. Some of the larvae is sealed or capped, but some are exposed. So we know the capped larvae are atleast 8 days old and the uncapped ones are large enough to be atleast 6-7 days old. So you've been without a queen for about a week. You have time to act, but you must act fast to purchase a new mated queen so there will be a minimal gap of emerging workers to keep the hive strong.


However, if there are no eggs and no sealed brood, it means that you will have nothing more than what you have. Each day, your hive will become smaller in number because without emerging brood the older bees will die. If you have no brood at all, sealed or unsealed, then you have an emergency! You must get a queen within the next few days. Pay extra and have her sent overnight. Every day counts. Your hive is a mere 30 days away from total collapse. Act fast.

Once the queen has perished, and the hive has attempted but failed to raise a replacement, you must act fast because without a queen, workers could become what is known as a laying worker. With the strong pheromone of open brood, not the queen pheromone, the other female workers’ ability to lay is suppressed. But without open brood pheromones, several female workers may start laying eggs. But since a female worker is not fully develop as a layer nor has she ever mated, nor could she, then her eggs are all infertile thus they will only become drones, male bees.

A laying worker in a hive usually means certain death of the colony. Since a laying worker will only produce male drones, the absence of workers means certain collapse of your hive. A laying worker does not have the long abdomen of a queen so when she lays, she cannot always place her eggs on the bottom of a deep cell. The eggs are often found on the side of a cell. But the obvious sign that you have a laying worker is that each cell contains many eggs. Sometimes a newly mated queen or a queen without room to lay may lay more than one egg in a cell, but a laying worker will fill up a cell with eggs. Study my photo here to familiarize yourself with what the eggs look like from having a laying worker. See the numerous eggs in the cells. Remember to click on the image to enlarge for a closer look.

It is suggested that even strong, queen right colonies always have a few laying workers, but the bees keep them in check. From the photo, can you see which one is the laying worker? No, you cannot. They are impossible to spot.

How do you get rid of a laying worker? Some say you can dump all the bees out in the yard, twenty feet or more away from the hive and the laying worker cannot find her way back in. Others say she can and will fly back. Some claim to have made special queen introduction cages which allow the newly mated queen to lay eggs on comb under a cage and eventually the bees will kill the laying worker. But introducing a queen into a hive with a laying worker often means the laying worker and her gang will attack and kill the newly introduced queen. And you’ll never find a laying worker. Don’t even bother trying, they all look the same.

I’ve had success by introducing new queens in cages into a laying worker hive, but it does take several tries. Unless you raise your own queens, this can be costly. It is easiest for me to remove a few frames from a queen right hive with the queen on it, and place them against the wall of a laying worker hive. The good queen along with her two frames of bees seem to seek and destroy the laying worker. Then you can easily replace the queen that you removed from the queen right hive.

The traditional solution is to take all the frames out of a laying worker hive and give them to strong colonies. The strong colony will usually kill the laying worker.

Finally, how can beekeepers protect their hives from becoming queenless?

Inspect your hive every 2 weeks. You do not necessarily have to spot the queen as long as you see that there is a good number of eggs and larvae. The photo to the left is what you want to find. Brood in various stages including eggs. This photo shows eggs near the edge of the frame.

Also be sure there is plenty of room for the queen to lay. If you see your hive is honey or pollen bound, you either have to shake out the pollen or extract the honey or put in empty drawn comb if you have some available. Failure to provide room in your hive for expansion can cause the bees to become congested. Remember we advocated crowded hives, but not congested hives. A congested hive means there is no more open, drawn out cells for the queen to lay in, or the forages to store pollen and nectar. Thus they will prepare to swarm.

Yesterday one of our hives did just that. Because we crowd our hives, they can become congested faster than we can sometimes give them drawn comb. But we'd rather err on the side of being too crowded than having a small and weak colony. Swarms are friendly. This swarm was gracious enough to agree to have their picture taken with me. I later shock them into a new hive and they are content now. By the way, if you are a beekeeper, you absolutely must have an extra hive on hand to catch swarms, swarms that come from your hive or for when you are called upon to help save a swarm near you. Yesterday a gentleman called us because he caught a swarm and had nothing to put it in.

Fortunately, we rushed him out a hive. But we cannot always send a hive right out, so please plan ahead. June is a big swarm month. Hives seem to swarm more on the first nice day after a storm or rainy weather. Now the hive that produced this swarm may become queenless. Hopefully they did their job, and produced a new queen. The old queen leaves with the swarm and the new emerging queen takes over. But remember, she is virgin queen, and must fly a mile or two away to mate with other drones, not from her hive. She can be killed in her flight by birds or storms. Will she make it back, and will she be mated well. Much is at stake.


Replace your queen yearly to ensure you have a young, prolific queen. Each day we send out queens to beekeepers across the country. These are queens that we raise from our honey bee farm that show the characteristics that we want in a honey bee.

We gather queens from their mating nucs once they've proven to be good layers. Then we add 4 attendants to care for the queen during shipment. Then, we add the candy plug along with one drop of water for the 1-2 day trip. It works out well.



We have mating nucs scatter throughout. The queens do not mate in the nuc, but it merely provides a place for the queen to live, be cared for and to show how well she can lay after she mates.


These mating nucs are near a cedar tree and use it as a land mark to find their way back to their specific hive. It is amazing that a queen can fly out, travel for miles to mate, and return home.

I was holding a virgin queen in my hand a few weekends ago, showing her to several people. She took flight, flew around a few times and was gone. The people were sad that she flew away. About twenty minutes later, she came back and landed on my leg. I picked her up and put her back in her cage. She did not mate on this flight. When queens return home from mating, they have the last male's genitalia still attached. Even though she returned home without a mating sign, it was still impressive that she had such a great sense of orientation and returned to her original take off point.

In fact, in my main mating yard, I can't even find my way around, but the queens do great picking out which hive is their home.


Some people use colors or markings on the hives or physical land marks, but we've found that for the most part the queens do fine finding their way back home.

Well, this concludes today's lesson and I hope it has been helpful to you in being able to keep your hive queenright!

Did you know that thousands of people read these lessons? And nearly 1,000 people have subscribed to receive these lessons directly to their email address. We want to thank each of you for your support of these free online beekeeping lessons and for sharing them with others.

If you want to subscribe and have these lessons sent to your email address, click here.

Enter your Email and we'll send you these lessons automatically





Preview Powered by FeedBlitz

You can easily unsubscribe at any time and it's free. Since these lessons are free, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that it does take money and time to put each lesson together. We receive alot of "thank you" emails and phone calls, telling us that these lessons have helped beekeepers greatly.

We welcome your donations toward producing more free lessons. Click the image here to make your donation. We appreciate it! If the link or image does not work well for you, then you can send your donation to: Long Lane Honey Bee Farms, C/O Free Lessons, 14556 N. 1020 E. Rd, Fairmount, IL 61841

If you need a queen or hive equipment, please feel free to give us a call. Since we have over 100 hives, we may not answer, so please leave a message. Our contact info is below.

Until next time, BEE-have yourself!

David & Sheri Burns
LONG LANE HONEY BEE FARMS
http://www.honeybeesonline.com/
217-427-2678

Read More »