Editor’s Note: Sam Bayer is the founder and recently retired CEO of Corevist, a Durham-based bootstrapped software company launched in 2008.  He will be recounting his entrepreneurial leadership experiences in his “Stories at Work” series for WRAL TechWire.  You can also follow Bayer on instagram @sam.bayer and at sam.bayer@gmail.com any feedback about this series.

His blogs are the latest addition to our Startup Monday package. WRAL TechWire would like to hear from you about views expressed by our contributors.  Please send email to: info@wraltechwire.com.

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DURHAM – Steve Jobs got it wrong.

To be sure, Apple’s co-founder got a lot of things right over the course of his career.  He launched the personal computing era with the Apple II, transformed the music industry with the iPod and introduced the two biggest threats to parent-child relationships, the iPhone and the iPad.

On June 12, 2005 in front of 23,000 Stanford graduates, friends and family, Jobs delivered a commencement speech destined to become one of the most viewed commencement addresses ever, with over 41M Youtube views as of this writing.

But, on that day he got it wrong.

Jobs declared:

“… you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever.”

Stories at Work: Know when to hold ’em, and when to fold ’em

What Steve Jobs missed

What Jobs missed is that pursuing goals enables you to see and connect dots.

In the early days after 9/11, a consulting assignment introduced me to the world of Criminal Intelligence.  This is a world predicated on gathering and connecting intelligence dots with the expressed goal of preventing bad guys from doing us harm.

I was helping Memex, a Scottish software company (now a part of SAS), commercialize their Intelligence Management Software. At its core, the technology gathers, connects and visualizes dots.  A dot in this case might be textual intelligence such as:

  • The name of an associate of a known criminal,
  • The make and model of an abandoned car,
  • An alarming post in a Facebook Group

My dot-connecting epiphany came while facilitating an Intelligence Gathering Focus Group with (armed) uniformed representatives of the Delaware State Police, Kent County Sheriff’s office, and the city of Dover’s Police Force.

I learned that if you had an important goal, such as preventing another 9/11, the future not only didn’t have to, but shouldn’t, depend on “gut, destiny, life, karma… or (sic)… whatever”.

It was empowering.

In the case of law enforcement the goal is to prevent crimes.

In the case of a startup business the goal is to grow revenue.

Stories at Work: Punch through the target

What does connecting the dots look like in business?

Dots are people, companies and relationships. The challenge is to generate and manage these dots and to connect them in support of our growth goals, namely get new client contracts signed.

Here is a typical dot connecting sequence.  This sequence represents true events that occurred over the span of several years (and actual names are omitted to protect their privacy):

  1. I met Person1 while serving on an Agile Software Development Panel discussion.
  2. A few years later LinkedIn alerts me that they changed jobs and now is leading the IT organization at Prospect1.
  3. I write to congratulate them and offer my services.  We have lunch to discuss Project1.  Which turns out to be a dead end, but we had a great conversation.
  4. We stay in touch and during one of our meetings they present Project2 for discussion.
  5. Project2 leads to them becoming Client1.
  6. During the course of executing Project2, we learn they do business with Partner1 and Partner2.
  7. Person1 at Client1 introduces us to Person2 (at Partner1) and Person3 (at Partner2).
  8. Turns out that Partner1 is a subsidiary of Prospect2 who has 10 different businesses that become Prospect2A – Prospect2J.
  9. We network our way into Prospect2A and convert them into Client2.
  10. Partner1 has over 100 prospects that look like Client1 and Client2. We put together a program to introduce ourselves to them and expand our dots.
  11. Turns out that Partner2 was also involved with Client2 but had a competitive offering to ours and wouldn’t entertain a conversation. One of many dead ends along the way.

Partners, Prospects, Persons, Projects are dots to connect in hopes of yielding new Clients (and, of course, more new Projects).

Stories at Work: Think like a pilot

Was Steve Jobs right about dot connecting?

In the end, maybe Jobs was right.  Maybe you do need faith that dots will eventually connect, because generating them takes a lot of work and there is no guarantee there will be a payoff.  Although, if history is prologue, generate enough dots, pursue a goal with determination, and they will connect.

Don’t wait for your future to come to you.  Go make it happen.  Generate and connect those dots!

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Bayer launched his career in 1980 working for IBM, which he left when he founded his first entrepreneurial endeavor Axiom Systems in 1987.  Axiom would eventually be taken public through an initial public offering.  Bayer notes that his entire 42-year professional career was guided by his determination to negotiate win-win value with his customers and fueled by his thirst for knowledge and scientific approach to problem solving.