Beyond Entrepreneurship 2.0

And therein lies the crucial aspect of core values and beliefs: they must be an absolutely authentic extension of the values and beliefs you hold in your own gut. You don’t “set” values. The proper question isn’t, “What values and beliefs should we have?” but rather “What values and beliefs do we actually hold in our gut?”

First—and this is important—you don’t criticize the person. Instead, you examine the event. It’s analogous to doing a good job of raising children; you address the issue of a messy closet, rather than criticizing your child for being a messy person. The same is true in managing. I always ask for the individual’s side of the story. I ask him to give

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

On important decisions that require widespread commitment for successful implementation, make the decision as a group, either participative or consensus. Enter the process with your own points of view, but be open to having your ideas influenced by others. Be clear whether the final decision is to be made by consensus or by you.

Let’s now turn our attention to the four primary benefits of corporate vision: Vision forms the basis of extraordinary human effort. Vision provides a context for strategic and tactical decisions. Shared vision creates cohesion, teamwork, and community. Vision lays the groundwork for the company to evolve past dependence on a few key individuals.

When I look back on my first six decades, I now see them more defined and shaped by “who” than “what,” consisting largely of “who luck” incidents—mentors, teachers, friends, colleagues, and partners who have altered and shaped the arc of my life.

One approach is to solve the specific problem or fill the specific need of an individual customer—not an individual customer group, but a single, solitary individual customer. The idea here is the same as above: if you invent a solution to the problem of a single customer, chances are there are other potential customers hidden in the woodwork that

Atchity hit the point perfectly in his book A Writer’s Time: If your work is successful,29 it generates more work; as a result, the concept of “finishing your work” is a contradiction in terms so blatant and so dangerous that it can lead to nervous breakdowns—because it puts the pressure on the wrong places in your mind and habits.

The point is a lesson that I wish I better embraced: the sheer value of having fun and enjoying yourself, of loving what you do, of living with the paradoxical assumption that you have decades of life left and that it might come to an end tomorrow.