Total Rethink

16If You Are Persistent, Your Plan B May Be Better Than Your Plan A

“It's disturbing to people that the small David can disturb the big Goliath.”

—Beny Steinmetz

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”

—John F. Kennedy

There is inevitably an element of trial and error involved the first time you do anything. I had never built a residential phone network before winning the contracts for Somerville and Dorchester, and I was up against a monopoly. That means I was the “David” of the situation, challenging the “Goliath” figure.

We started by bundling a phone and a cable line together in one, with a homerun cable to every customer's house, which made the cable enormously thick and heavy. We then ran it across the telephone or power poles, which was great until winter brought the first ice storm and the weight became too much, dragging all the cables down into the streets. Standing outside in the bitterly cold January air, looking at my life's work to date lying on the snowy sidewalk, I realized we were going to have to redesign it with more of a “hub and spoke” architecture.

Even though we made some mistakes, however, our thesis about the future trend of private phone companies was right, and so the project still worked out with the new adjustments. We had identified a trend that was ultimately unstoppable, however many stumbles and setbacks there might be along the way.

Creative entrepreneurs always need to be ready to adapt when ...