There are a few potential titles to this post…….”Pivoting For Success”?, “Dilbert’s Creator With Inside Commentary on Silicon Valley”?

But in this blog post by Scott Adams, the creator of the Dilbert cartoon as well as a co-founder of Calendar Tree (www.calendartree.com) has an interesting take on “pivoting” for technology start-ups.  Prior to joining the team at oneZero (www.oneZero.com), I had launched two non-technology start-ups.  What is different from my experience is the concept that when pivoting within the technology field you keep the same core team, company name and structure and just change the product.  But that is what is great about technology; the ease of changing the product.  The servers that hosted one product or source code can still serve the same purpose for new code and/or products.  The programmers who were coding to build a specific outcome can change their direction and product goal.

In my past experience in financial services, a failed product usually meant closing down the business entity and the associated dissolution of the management team.  Any new concept had to be restarted from the ground up with a new entity, management team and employees.  I am not saying that there is not management and employee turnover within a pivoting technology firm, just that there is less need for personnel with different skill sets and that they change of product can be made quickly and much easier than with a traditional manufactured product or even a financial service.

http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/the_pivot/

** Thanks to Chris Dixon’s Twitter feed (@cdixon) for the find**