Beyond Entrepreneurship 2.0

Strategy is simply the basic methodology you intend to apply to attain your company’s current mission. “This is how we will achieve our mission.” That, in a nutshell, is strategy. There’s no mystery to it. It’s not a difficult concept.

Keep projects small as long as possible, thus making it easier to say, “Well, that didn’t work. Let’s try something else.” If a project becomes too big too quickly, it’ll begin to fight for its own life, even though it might be wiser to end the experiment and start a new one: “Hey, we’ve assigned seventeen people and spent a year on this thing. We

Peter F. Drucker, in his classic text, Management: Task, Responsibilities, Practices, reached the same conclusion years ago: Business cannot be defined or explained in terms of profit …25 The concept of profit maximization is, in fact, meaningless … The first test of any business is not the maximization of profit, but the achievement of sufficient

Allow employees to take time to field test products or services. At L.L.Bean, for example,37 any Bean executive can get an extra week’s vacation to do product testing, even if that means a fly-fishing trip in Alaska, going to Ontario for the opening of the duck and goose season, or checking out enormous Danner Yukon cold-weather hunting boots in Br

A particularly useful question is, “What are we better at than anyone else, and what are our unique capabilities that give us a competitive advantage?” The literature of strategic management ascribes a ponderous term to this notion (“Distinctive Competence”), but the idea is really pretty simple. It’s also important. Simply put, smart firms stick t

Toss out the traditional annual review process and replace it with a goal-setting and review process. Consider doing it on a quarterly basis. Yes, quarterly.

Innovation is equally important in day-to-day manufacturing and operations. There is a wonderful example of creativity applied to operations at Federal Express.66 At one point, packages were getting backed up at its main sorting hub in Memphis, and no control system solved the problem. Then someone noticed that part-time workers were slowing the sy

Strategy is impossible without first setting a vision.

Judicious use of analysis is good, as long as you don’t fall prey to “analysis paralysis.” There are seldom enough facts or data to eliminate all risk or to make a decision based solely on those facts. Furthermore, all business analysis is dramatically affected by your assumptions. Two people looking at the same set of facts will often come to enti

Do reference checks. THIS IS IMPORTANT. If we had to pick one place where companies consistently trip up in the hiring process, it’s that they don’t do reference checks. Check references with former bosses, subordinates, peers, and others. An employee should never be hired without at least two reference checks, and we recommend five or more.