Beyond Entrepreneurship 2.0

Tom Chappell, founder of Tom’s of Maine, a highly profitable company, explained in Inc. magazine how the pursuit of numbers alone is an endless treadmill: Quantitative goals can’t invest purpose in a process that has none.26 The quest simply for more of anything is inherently unsatisfying. If there is no point or joy in what you are doing, or if yo

Does the person see work as a job or a responsibility? The right people in key seats understand that they don’t have “jobs”; they have responsibilities. They grasp the difference between their task list and their true responsibilities. A great doctor doesn’t merely have the “job” of performing procedures but embraces responsibility for the health o

You can look at life as a search for that one big winning hand, or you can look at life as a series of hands well played. If you believe life comes down to a single hand, of course, you can easily lose. But if you see life as a series of hands, and if you play each hand the best you can, there’s a huge compounding effect. Bad luck can kill you, but

During its rise from entrepreneurial start-up to great company, Intel installed a mechanism for decision making called “constructive confrontation.” As a member of the Intel team, you carried the burden to argue, debate, and disagree to help solve pressing problems.

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

In fact, research on creativity shows that significant creative contributors have wide interests, a breadth of perspective, and a need for novelty and diversity. Innovation often comes from seeing the relationship between unconnected ideas and melding them together.

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.42 We seek to beat the life and soul out of Hitler and Hitlerism. That alone. That all the time. That to the end.

you’ve got to be a role model of the culture you want to create.

Like a good teacher, a good leader assumes that people from all walks of life and backgrounds can perform at high levels and that, deep down, they want to. A good leader doesn’t demand high performance (demanding implies that people are basically lazy and are inclined to withhold their best effort— that it must be extracted out of them, like pullin