Sparrow Training

Scuttle Your Ships Before Advancing, Richard Luecke

I have never lost my love of history. I am always constantly dumfounded how often the lessons from history are not learned and mistakes are repeated.

Therefore, this is a book I was immediately drawn to when it was first published back in the 90’s. This book blends lessons from great historial events and draws parallels with business strategies. There are stories relevant to Entrepreneuriship, Change Management, Use of Ideas, Strategy, Global Management, Managing in Turbulent Times and Innovation.

The story I most enjoyed was that of Don Cortez in his quest to conquer Mexico, and the title of the book is taken from this incident.

The scuttling your ships incident is a metaphor for making a “no going back decision” that is very characteristic of those taken by entrepreneurs.

Its the big play of once committed there is no way out. This type of decision was taken by Oracle Corporation in the late 90’s when it decided to change all its software to be built from the ground up based on an “internet architecture”. Oracle’s CEO Larry Ellison effectively bet the company on the internet being a serious business platform for the future. If you took that same decision today it would be a “no brainer”. But then the internet was being used for email (sometimes you got as much as 10 meails a day!), and freeware; then Netscape was the industry darling, and guys in beards and sandals talked about the corruption of the global village.

The Oracle decision was brave as it also meant throwing away years of development in client server based applications and technology, which was then dominant approach. It also meant taking 2 to 3 years to buidl the new set of applications which if it did not pay off the competition would have spent that time providing ever better functionality to their client server applications and hence it would be to far a lead to recover from.

This is an example of really making a commitment. In the Goal Setting course we explore how the commitment to achievement is such an important and necessary factor in success and that kind of decision making is essential to high achievers.

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