Brian Gubernick explains Jim Collins's "fire bullets before cannonballs" principle: low-cost experiments that gather data before making big bets. Apple tested the iPod and iTunes before launching the iPhone as a massive, calculated move. The framework applies to business, product development, health, and relationships.
Chapters
Thank you for joining me today. It's Brian Gubernick and welcome to the No Days Off podcast where we believe that every single day brings a new opportunity to get better. Let's get into today's topic. Today I want to talk about firing bullets before cannonballs. Fire— firing bullets before cannonballs. What am I talking about here? This actually comes from a book by Jim Collins. Many of you are probably familiar with Jim Collins. He wrote Good to Great, and then he wrote Great by Choice. This, this concept actually comes out of Great by Choice. The idea is you first fire bullets. These are the low cost, the low risk, the low distraction experiments. You fire bullets to figure out what in fact will work, calibrating the direction you need to go. And then once you have data to support that move, you then fire the cannonball, which would be concentrating resources into, say, a big bet. You have a calibrated line of sight. You can now fire a cannonball. Let me give you an excerpt from Great by Choice that will give you an idea as to this concept, and then we can talk about how it might apply in your world. So per Jim Collins, picture yourself at sea and a hostile ship is bearing down on you. You have a limited amount of gunpowder. You take all of your gunpowder and you use it to fire a big cannonball. The cannonball flies out over the ocean and it misses the target. It's off by 40 degrees. You turn to your stockpile and you now discover that you're out of gunpowder. So what happens? You die. But suppose instead that when you see the ship bearing down on you, you take a little bit of gunpowder and fire a bullet. This bullet misses by 40 degrees. Now you make another bullet with a little bit of gunpowder and you fire again. This time you miss by 30 degrees. You make a third bullet and you fire. And you miss only by 10 degrees. The next bullet you make, it hits. It hits the hull of the oncoming ship. Now you can take all of the remaining gunpowder and fire a big cannonball along that same line of sight. And what happens? You sink the enemy ship. You live. Now, I love, I love this story. I love this analogy. I think we could all, like, you all should be thinking right now in business and in life around maybe when you fired a cannonball, when you should have first shot a bullet, maybe shot a bullet multiple times to calibrate before you launch that cannonball. In Great by Choice, Jim Collins finds that, that the big companies, the successful companies, they fire cannonballs. However, the companies that aim to be successful but don't quite make it there, they also fire cannonballs. However, they tend to fire cannonballs before they've actually confirmed or obtained a direct line of sight, a calibration, before they have data gained through experience that helps them direct their cannonball towards its intended target. The best companies though are much more likely to calibrate their cannonballs By shooting bullets, by, by diving in and testing and iterating. And instead of shooting a cannonball right out the gate that may miss, they take small shots until they know where they want to go. A good example of this in the real world is a little company we all know as Apple. Apple in 2001 created the iPod. It was, you know, as you may remember, the iPod was this, this digital music player. Really, really cool, really unique, really innovative. It gained a lot of popularity, but the reality is the iPod was only about 3% of all of Apple sales. So it was rather insignificant. But later in 2001, to complement the iPod, Apple launches iTunes. It launches iTunes, which was all the media. Now remember, at this time, you know, people were downloading music, oftentimes illegally. They weren't paying for it. Well, what Apple found through its testing, through its iteration, is that people were not upset to pay 99 cents. It didn't bother them to pay 99 cents for a song. They actually did not mind that in the slightest bit if they had easy access to clean data. So Apple has this iPod, the bullet it fires. Then it fires another bullet in iTunes. Then in 2003, it actually creates the iTunes Store. Then it creates, through these multiple shots, a cannonball, which is complete digital music revolution. iPod and iTunes completely changed the way that people consume music. Fast forward just a few more years, 2007, Steve Jobs and Apple introduce the very first iPhone. The iPhone took the functionality of the iPod and obviously combined it with the phone and the ability to access the internet. And I think we all know the rest of the story. We had to have the iPod, we had to have iTunes, we had to have the music revolution. We had to shift to digital downloading that the iTunes Store popularized before we got to the iPhone. These are all bullets. These are all bullets. And I do believe that Steve Jobs' vision was not necessarily just the iPod. It was well beyond that and morphed into the iPhone. So how does this apply to your world would be my question. What are you working on right now? Maybe it's a shift in strategy. Maybe it's a new product. Maybe it's a way you think you can revolutionize your respective business or industry. What are you working on right now that you can, instead of firing a cannonball because you think you know the answer, shoot some bullets to get data and actually validate what you believe to be the answer? That would be your focusing question today. That would be your focusing question today. Now, what's the, what's the challenge for many of us with this? Or what I'm asking you to do is slow down before you speed up. And that's hard. I'm asking you to crawl before you walk and walk before you run. I think there's a lot of opportunity here if we slow down, recognizing that we're playing the long game, and if we take bullets take shots with bullets and take some time to test. And then once we confirm, we have very clear direction. I think it would pay off and that would pay off not just in business, but I think this is really applicable in your personal world as well. Thinking about your health, you've got to figure out different things that could work for you before you maybe potentially go all in. Don't just say on, you know, your New Year's resolution, I'm going to start running miles upon miles. And you've never really even run. Maybe you want to get a feel for that, or maybe hiking's your thing, or maybe weights are your thing. The idea here is, can you go test multiple, you know, approaches to this and figure out what you're most motivated by before you shoot that cannonball, right? Same goes for relationships. If you're trying to change the course of a relationship, yes, you have to have a solution, and yes, you've got to approach it aggressively, but can you You know, shoot bullets in that you're having certain lighter conversations before the deeper one. Can you get a feel for a direction or a mindset or an emotion before you make a decision as to how to proceed? I bet you can. So on that note, that's all we have for today. The No Days Off podcast. Thank you so much for listening. And remember, every single day brings a new opportunity to get better. So let's get after it.
