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

We live in a world rich in success but impoverished in meaning. A life of relentless work without meaning is brutal and dark. Most of us will never have the depth of love in our daily work that Manchester had with his fellow Marines. But we can move closer to it by building a culture where people depend on people.

If you spend your life keeping your options open, that’s exactly what you’ll do . . . spend your life keeping your options open.

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

ACCEPT RESPONSIBILITY AND SHARE CREDIT Be prepared to shoulder full responsibility for poor decisions and, conversely, to share the credit for good decisions. If you do the opposite—if you take all the credit for good decisions but blame others for mistakes—you will quickly lose the respect of your people.

One of our favorite examples of a good mission statement is Britain’s mission in 1940, as articulated by Winston Churchill: Our whole people and empire have vowed themselves to the single task of cleansing Europe of the Nazi pestilence and saving the world from the new dark ages. We seek to beat the life and soul out of Hitler and Hitlerism. That a

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?

Like such a teacher, a leader idealizes people and has resolute conviction that people can rise to this ideal. A leader grabs the spirit in people, pulling it forward and waking it up. A leader changes people’s perceptions of themselves, getting them to see themselves in the idealized way that he sees them.

Here, then, is a basic architecture of executive decision making we found in our research: Determine how much time you have to decide, whether minutes, hours, days, months, or even years. Stimulate dialogue and debate—guided by facts and evidence—to determine the best options. Make a decision, firm and unambiguous, once you’re clear on what must be

The percentage of key seats on the bus filled with the right people for those seats.