Management & Leadership

What can someone who's built multiple billion-dollar companies teach you? Some lessons from my conversation with Brad Jacobs: 1. If you get the major trend right, you can make mistakes and still succeed. 2. If you want extraordinary results, you can’t think like everyone else. 3. Complexity hides opportunity. 4. Focus on return on capital and return on time. 5. Your job is to multiply shareholder wealth. 6. Problems are assets, not liabilities. 7. Anyone can buy a company; integration creates (or destroys) value. 8. Companies don’t go bankrupt from bad ideas. They go bankrupt from too much debt. 9. Speed without quality is reckless. Quality without speed is irrelevant. 10. Rigid plans miss opportunities; improvisation captures them. 11. Being liked and being contrarian aren’t opposites; you need both. 12. So much of business success comes from keeping your head in a good place. 13. Look for people motivated by money. This is capitalism, not a charity. (Must have integrity.) 14. The most powerful thing in any relationship is giving someone 100% of your attention. 15. Standardization enables scale. 16. Ask the top employees what they’d change; they know reality. 17. Survey employees constantly. They know where the opportunities hide. 18. Reward people for helping others win, not just for winning alone. 19. People need to feel understood before they’ll accept change. 20. You can’t fake appreciation. Rearrange your brain to see the real good in people. 21. Ask what shouldn’t change. The good stuff tells you as much as the problems. 22. How you end a meeting matters more than how you start it. 23. Feelings count in business. You want the love vibe, not the hate vibe. 24. Musicians make better CEOs than MBAs because they know how to improvise. 25. Technology is an accelerant, not a strategy. (Brad Jacobs on The Knowledge Project)