BE 2.0 (Beyond Entrepreneurship 2.0): Turning Your Business into an Enduring Great Company

CHOICES—DECISIVENESS REVISITED Setting priorities requires making tough choices as to what is really important. One reason so many people have such a difficult time getting focused is that they also have a difficult time making decisions: they balk at choosing which items will be left off their priority list. And you must be willing to take items o

We have no sympathy for managers who don’t back their words with actions. Granted, no one is perfect, and we all fail to live 100% up to our ideals. But some company leaders don’t even live up to 25% of their ideals. Their talk is rhetoric. Their insincerity is nauseating. They don’t deserve to be leaders. And, indeed, they certainly will not build

Of course, all this depends on having the right people. You need people who can argue and debate out of passionate commitment to the success of the enterprise, who argue for the best decisions to help the organization and its cause, not themselves. You need people who would rather see the team win and their argument lose than to see their argument

In this chapter, we’ve identified the elements of style that are common among effective leaders. They are: Authenticity Decisiveness Focus Personal Touch Hard/Soft People Skills Communication Ever Forward

You might try making a decision and living with it for 24 hours without telling anybody. This lets you observe how the decision feels before making it public.

To be clear, I’m not saying financial incentives lack impact. Indeed, the evidence from economics makes clear: People do respond to incentives (even if they are not the primary source of motivation for the best people). To ignore the influence of incentives is to ignore human nature. And that leads me to a key point: The wrong incentives are not me

When operating at its best, the Cleveland Clinic turned this “get the right people” obsession into a reinforcing loop of momentum: Start with the right people operating in a collaborative culture that drives patient outcomes, which then feeds into attracting patients from around the world, which then generates reputation and resources to invest in

And yet, ironically, for most companies, it’s rarely the metric first discussed—if it’s discussed at all. However, to build a truly great and lasting company, it must rise to the top. And what’s that metric? The percentage of key seats on the bus filled with the right people for those seats. Stop and think: What percentage of your key seats do you

At one point during a break, Lemann said, “Jim, I sense you are a bit nervous about the magnitude of this thing.” “Yes, I know you thrive on big bets, but this is a huge bet. We need to make sure the board is making a disciplined decision, not one based in hubris.” “I get that, but you don’t understand my basic problem,” Lemann said, pausing for ef

If you have people who are unsuited to anything except the specific idea or business strategy you have in mind, what happens when that idea fails and you need to move on to the next idea and the next one after that?