Lead Bullets

The problem it solves

Organisations losing ground to a competitor tend to look for a move that changes the situation without changing the thing they sell, and there's usually a queue of candidates ready. A partnership, a rebrand, a restructure, a new head of sales, an acquisition, a pivot into the adjacent market where the competitor isn't yet.

Every one of those is a real option and some of them work, which is most of why the search feels like strategy rather than avoidance. They also share a property that's easy to miss while you're comparing them against each other, which is that none of them touches the reason the deals are being lost. If the other product is measurably better at the thing customers are buying it for, then the partnership changes who you're standing next to, the restructure changes who reports to whom, the sales hire changes who's in the room, and the evaluation still goes the same way.

There's a second pull that rarely gets said out loud. The clever options are announceable. A partnership can be signed and communicated inside a quarter, and a capability gap produces no news at all until it's closed, so a leadership team under pressure to show progress drifts steadily towards whichever option has something to report.

The idea

Ben Horowitz set the rule out in a 2011 essay drawn from two situations he'd been in. At Netscape the web server was being beaten by Microsoft's, which matched it on features, ran several times faster and was about to be given away; six years later, at Opsware, BladeLogic started taking the large deals. Both times the executive team spent its energy looking for a way round, and both times a colleague told him there wasn't one.

There are no silver bullets for this, only lead bullets.

A lead bullet is ordinary ammunition, which is what you fire when there's no magic available. In practice it means the engineering that closes the gap, done by the people already there, for as long as it takes. Netscape's server line eventually beat Microsoft's on the thing it was losing on and grew into a four-hundred-million-dollar business, and Opsware built the better product and was sold to Hewlett-Packard for one and a half billion.

Enlarge: Bar height is the capability gap that's deciding the deals, and the two rows are two ways of spending the same quarters.

Two rows of four bars, where bar height is the capability gap losing the deals. The top row, looking for a silver bullet, runs through a partnership, a reorganisation, a price cut and a rainmaker hire, and every bar stands at the same height, so the gap ends as wide as it started. The lower row, firing lead bullets, covers speed, defects, features and the bake-off, each bar shorter than the last.

Bar height is the capability gap that's deciding the deals, and the two rows are two ways of spending the same quarters.Close

Bar height is the capability gap that's deciding the deals, and the two rows are two ways of spending the same quarters.

The mechanism is the part worth carrying away, and it's a question rather than a slogan. Every option on the list moves some quantity, so the thing to establish is which one. Attention, margin, reporting lines and headcount are all real quantities and all of them are available quickly. The gap that's deciding the evaluations is a different quantity, and lead bullets are defined by being the one class of move that touches it, which is also why they're slow, unpopular and impossible to present as progress while they're running.

How to use it

Name the quantity you're losing on before you compare any options, and name it concretely. Not that the product is behind, but the number that decides the meeting, so the overnight run time, the missing integration, the uptime figure in the security questionnaire, the count of clicks to the answer somebody wanted.

Then take each proposed move and say out loud which quantity it changes. It's a short exercise and an uncomfortable one, because most of the list turns out to change something adjacent, and whoever proposed each item has generally attached some credibility to it by the time the meeting happens.

If nothing on the list touches the gap, then the gap is the work. That means choosing the two or three things that close it, telling the company that this is what the next two quarters are for, and accepting in advance that there'll be nothing to announce in the meantime, which is the part that usually gets negotiated away.

Then keep measuring the gap rather than the effort. Effort is easy to demonstrate and it's what a team under pressure will show you, and a gap that's narrowing is the evidence that the grind is aimed at the right thing.

Where it breaks down

Every concept here has one. It is the section most summaries leave out.

It's survivors' advice, and the survivors wrote it. Both companies in the essay came out the other side, one of them worth a billion and a half. Teams that made the same call with the same conviction and ran out of money before the gap closed don't publish, so the sample you learn from has the failures removed. Denrell's argument is that this is how persistence in general comes to look reliable, because a risky practice looks good among survivors even when it's unrelated to performance across everybody who tried it.

It presupposes the diagnosis, and the diagnosis is the hard part. Losing on distribution, on a trusted intermediary, on price, on switching costs or on a network effect all feel identical from the inside, and grinding on the product is the most expensive available response to any of them. The rule gives you no test at all for which situation you're in. In Horowitz's case it was obvious, and obviousness doesn't generalise.

There's no stopping rule. Persistence is also what sunk cost produces, and the two are indistinguishable from the inside at the moment you'd want to tell them apart. A team six quarters into a grind with a gap that hasn't narrowed is following the same advice as a team one quarter from closing it, and the essay offers nothing to separate them.

It gets borrowed for its toughness. In practice the phrase turns up most often as a way of asking for weekends, which is a different claim and a much weaker one. Concentrating everything on one gap and dropping the other work is the actual content, and it's usually the part that goes missing when the vocabulary gets picked up.

The market it came from is a friendly one for the argument. Enterprise software with long sales cycles and low switching costs lets a better product win back the same buyers a year later. Where there's real lock-in, or where the decision is made by somebody who'll never see the comparison, the better product arrives on time and nobody moves, and the grind was still the wrong call.

Some of the moves it dismisses are occasionally right. Selling the company, leaving the segment or shutting the line down are real answers to a gap that can't be closed with the resources available, and the essay's rhetorical force makes those harder to say in a room that has just been told to be tough.

In one line

When something is genuinely beating you, ask which quantity each clever move would actually change, and if none of them changes the gap then the gap is the work.