A summary of things you should know about Small Business Big Pressure according to Darryl Lyons Introduction (0:48) I’m an entrepreneur, I co-founded a company called Pax Financial Group andRead More
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]]>I’m an entrepreneur, I co-founded a company called Pax Financial Group and I have been advising and leading individuals and small business owners with their money for 15 years now. Our company has become one of the best places to work in the community so I am really proud to lead a small business and write about it.
One is that I am a small business owner talking to small business owners, so the tested in the trenches idea. Then I try to keep the format very simple, I didn’t want to make it overly complex. And the most important thing is I have really integrated my faith into the content and not all entrepreneurs are willing to do that and be vulnerable in that way.
I understand business owners have ADHD like me. I did put the book together for people to be able to jump from chapter to chapter. I do suggest that people read the first two chapters and the last two chapters but outside of that if they want to dive into one component they will be ok doing that.
In each section of the book we experience a degree of pressure and worry and confusion. So whether it’s confusion about the vision, or the worry with money, or the pressure with hiring and firing. The one thing that I would like the entrepreneur to get away is the degree of faith in God that’s necessary as an entrepreneur to overcome that worry, pressure, and confusion.
The framework of the book was really developed with the entrepreneur in mind, my family of entrepreneurs, clients I have worked with over the years. I have also received feedback from entrepreneurs over the content so it’s really designed for business owners by business owners. The framework has four components.
The first part is that the small business or business owner needs to wrestle with direction, where are they going and how to get there. So creating a vision, many times we talk about developing a vision and mission statement and we develop a framework of how to do that.
Then when we start executing that vision (many times that’s selling a product or service) then the dollars reflect our efforts. The second part of the book will examine how you effectively manage your money and what is the prudent way to manage your money as a business owner. So I do talk about money but I do it in a way that I think business owners will find refreshing and simple.
As you start to build up this bank account and make money you recognize that your time is worth more than money and there are skill sets you don’t have so you need to hire somebody. So I talk about the process of hiring but it’s not so much hiring but the development of that person that’s supporting us as entrepreneurs. This can be as simple as a virtual assistant or as complex as an administrative staff or person.
The fourth step is building a cohesive team that sings from the same sheet of music and we create an identity as a company. The identity is really more important than you would ever think as a business owner. When you have more than one person, you have to make sure that you are all playing by the same rules. You need to ensure that you have clear principles that you abide by and a value proposition that we don’t just put on a business card but that you actually believe in.
So the four sections that I outlined that can be pulled apart independent of each other are: destination, dollars, dialogue, and identity. Different business owners find that each section resonates with them differently depending on where they are at in their business owner and entrepreneur journey.
NOTE: That was just a summary. To get the full deep dive, play the audio clip at 3:59
In a conversation with God he asked me, “Are you done yet, are you done worrying?” - Darryl Lyons
The Rest of the Gospel by Dan Stone and Greg Smith
His Website: http://www.smallbusinessbigpressure.com/
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]]>A summary of things you should know about The Responsible Business according to CAROL SANFORD Introduction (0:41) About two weeks ago a joined The University of Washington founding a centerRead More
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]]>About two weeks ago a joined The University of Washington founding a center that is going to house the many many decades of my work under something called ‘The Responsible Business Center.’ I also work a lot with individuals now through seed communities, I’m an author of two award winning and Best Selling books, and as a result I do a lot of keynote speaking.
One of the real differences is that it goes away from the flat line view and everyone is developed in their functional role. This book is to help innovative people understand how all of that fits together. It really gives you a systems view, rather than a fragmented view, while telling stories of businesses.
Actually I suggest that people go to the last chapter and read it first because it gives you a philosophical stance on the book. Most people tell me that if you read the first four chapters that you then can move around. But until you’ve read the prologue (which is a case study), the overview of the case stories, and the structure of the book, then you can move around through the book.
I think it’s a paradigm shift of going from breaking things down into fragments to where you start to think and know that everyone that works there can think from the mind of the CEO. If they have a framework that gives them a system then they can understand how it all works together.
This book is really about a way to have people experience a radical different way of experiencing business. Can you imagine that if you went into a laboratory in biology and someone said, “here’s a living frog, now put it in the jar and put chloroform on it, and then cut it up in pieces.” And then they say that they want the frog to hop, the frog can’t hop once you cut it up, but that’s exactly what we do to a business. We have people become so functionally driven, so broken apart into pieces. We even take the strategies and make lists of them and the people responsible for them and then we are very surprised when we can’t get alignment and create something that works well. We created that same dissected frog way to people that might be called stake holders in a business and we have to figure out how we trade off, one for the other most of the time. Then you have a view of being an upstanding citizen and wanting earth to be healthy and then we treat those as they are independent processes. Then we do the same thing with people we hire, employees are working hands and suppliers are even further away. There’s so much energy put into looking at those as different departments and functions, this book has the intention of how to understand how it all works together.
NOTE: That was just a summary. To get the full deep dive, play the audio clip at 6:16
“Be value adding and not value added.” – Carol Sanford
One was that I had been working with corporations for 25 years and I maintain relationships with people and they told me that I needed to tell all these stories. The bigger one was I was walking around a book store one day and I was looking at a table of business books and they all had a separate subject. There was marketing, accounting, sales, but there was no sense that there was one written by the mind of the CEO about the business as a whole.
The Starfish and the Spider by Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom
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carolsanfordinstitute.com
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]]>A summary of things you should know about How On Earth according to DONNIE MACLURCAN Introduction (0:51) I’m an Australian who moved to the west coast of the US aRead More
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]]>
I’m an Australian who moved to the west coast of the US a couple of years ago. I have a background that expands over a few different fields. I worked as an exercise physiologist for about 8 years, as a sports coach for about 15 years, and then I went on to get a PhD looking at the impacts of nano technology. This got me interested in the issues of international equality and economics and the intersects of those. During my time with my PhD I set up a company that helped people to start, scale, and sustain their not for profit initiatives. This is where the intersection of my work in economics and having established the post growth institute several years before came together. I then intersected my work in social innovation in Australia and my economics work and looked at how those two things came together in designing new economic systems.
Typically we’ve found that books that explore economy beyond growth or beyond capitalism fall into a number of common traps. They either present a world of utopia and say that this is how the world should be but they’re really vague on the steps that should be taken to get there or they’ll put out something that looks similar to state socialism and therefore turns a lot of people off. What we do is present a model that is based on existing trends in the global economy and that is the rise of not for profits. What we do is look at a model that is already in movement but we believe there is a tendency that these companies are out performing the equivalent for profit businesses, indicating that we are heading for a not for profit world. We are hoping that this book expands on this in a way that gives people the agency for how they can contribute to this trend.
I think we have designed this to be read front to back or for someone to cherry pick. We designed a nice arch that goes through the experience that we’ve actually had in both creating the book and delivering it and getting feedback on it. We’ve learned how to present the ideas in a way that’s really palpable. We take the reader on the same journey we went on so that they understand the way we do. We start at reimagining profit, and then we move through what’s actually emerging in the world and finally look at the actual business competitiveness of the model. So you can read it entirely or you can jump in and cherry pick if you just in and just read one of those sections.
It’s a question, a question to ask yourself. What if businesses that place purpose in front of profit increasingly outperform those that don’t?
In reading How on Earth, you’re going to be taken on a journey, a journey that replicates our own. We start by exploring these words: profit and not for profit. We find that profit for most people represents greed, excess, and excesses of capitalism that people have challenges with. And not for profit is seen as that third part of an economy
that plays a supplement type role for the government or the state and the for profit business sector. The exciting thing that we uncover is that you get to see how the economy has changed dramatically over the past 20-30 years. What you find here is that not for profits are typically understood as volunteer-run charity organizations that work in the social services sector. The reality has become that not for profit business managers that run businesses or organizations that the money goes back in to fill the mission of the organization with purpose being the primary motivation, those managers had started to get sick and frustrated that during economic downturns their funding would dry up. So we uncovered some interesting data that between 2001 and 2011 there were more non-profit organizations added to the U.S. economy than there were for profit businesses. Not only that, but the salaries at these organizations went up faster than the for profit business salaries went up. In addition to this, they also contributed to GDP faster than GDP was growing itself, in other words, they were taking market share in the economy. We wanted to find out how this could be. The fact is that non-profit managers that were sick of the economic downturns got into business themselves. They set up businesses underneath them, either a subsidiary companies or as companies sitting within the broader non-profit itself and they started to money themselves for their organizations.
From this we asked, what if businesses that put purpose before profit continue to outperform those that don’t? That is the core thesis that we explore in this book and what we discover is that as we are heading towards this non-profit economy where businesses put purpose first and there is no basis for shareholder activity. What we find is that the banking system, the finance system, things like debt, interest, limited liability, all of these things that are quite destructive in our society actually become very functional in an economy that is putting money back in instead of extracting it out. An economy that can function based on need instead of greed.
NOTE: That was just a summary. To get the full deep dive, play the audio clip at 7:36
“The inherit vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings, the inherit virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.” -Winston Churchill
The inspiration came in 2009 when I was at a conference and a gentleman spoke about his engineering company with a 50 person staff and 17 million dollar turnover. And then he said the words that changed my life, “and we are not for profit.” I had never heard of or thought of a not for profit engineering company, the not for profits I was familiar with were typically charities run by volunteers. So to hear that this type of company was possible was really exciting and the core inspiration for this project to develop these ideas further.
Small is Beautiful by E.F. Schumacher
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]]>A summary of things you should know about Roll Up Your Sleeves & Get To Work according to RICK KOLSTER Introduction (0:34) I go by the name of Coach Rick.Read More
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]]>I go by the name of Coach Rick. I am a certified business coach, speaker, author, and my passion is helping people become the best they can be. Early on in my life I was blessed with great mentors that taught be that reading was the way to get to where you wanted to be. My first business books were Think and Grow Rich and The Greatest Salesman in the World, and those books changed my life. Now I serve as an executive coach and a trainer.
I’m going to take a quote from one of my clients, “Rick unites both business and life coaching in a totally practical, imaginative, and useful way.” I want to touch people in a way that they can understand. There’s not a lot of fluff in the book, it’s really get down and get to work. This book is really about the reader and getting them motivated and excited about doing things.
They can jump in and jump out. The chapters are pretty short and easy to read. It’s broken down into three components: listen, learn, and live. So each little chapter you are going to find information, cool stories, and action steps you can take.
It’s simple, it’s do something. In the book we have the 12 points for success, the 12 commandments is what I call them. Commandment number one is ‘do something.’ Commandment number two is ‘if not now, then when?’ Just take it and do something. It’s easier to move a ship that’s in motion than a ship that’s standing still.
I broke the book into three components to make it easy to read: listening, learning, and living. The first thing we really talk about is how do you wake up in the morning? What’s your attitude? Your attitude is going to determine how your day goes. If you wake up with a cruddy attitude then you’re going to have a cruddy day. If you wake up with a great attitude then you’re probably going to have a good chance at having a good day.
We then talk about your belief systems. What are you putting in? What are you digesting every day? At the end of each chapter there is a short easy exercise, where you can take what you just read and put something behind it and really dig in. My purpose with that was for the reader to intellectually challenge themselves every day.
Finally, we talk about purpose. We were all put on this planet for a reason, I truly believe that. Our job as individuals is to find that purpose and live for that purpose. From here we work on how do you do it? It’s about attitude, it’s about commitment, and it’s about getting it to action. Those three pieces are really what drives the entire book and everything that I do.
NOTE: That was just a summary. To get the full deep dive, play the audio clip at 7:38
“Make a decision, right or wrong but make something happen.” -Rick Kolster
It was really all about what I do every day and who I am. I ended up being the guy who gets things done. The inspiration behind it is what I get to do every day and the amazing clients that I interact with. I have been blessed with a lot and I wanted to figure out how to give back to the world.
The Greatest Salesman in the World by Og Mandino Selling for Geniuses by Rick Kolster
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]]>A summary of things you should know about Rejection Proof according to Jia Jiang Introduction (00:37) I am an entrepreneur and what I do is deal with everything that comesRead More
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]]>I am an entrepreneur and what I do is deal with everything that comes with rejection. Help people overcome their fear of rejection, tell stories about rejection, and help businesses turn rejection into opportunities.
It’s a combination of story but also research and knowledge. I lived this myself and it’s a really fun story. If you like stories then you will love this book, I included stories but I also embedded a lot of research in there.
They can do both. The whole book is a story but inside of the book I included lessons in each chapter. So you can jump in and take the lessons or you can read it front to back.
Two words, just ask. In the book I talk about an experience where I went to fly someone’s plane. I went to an air field in Austin and in the lobby I saw this pilot and asked if I could fly his plane. I thought there was no way he was going to say yes, I didn’t have training, a license, knowledge, or even courage to fly a plane. But the guy said sure and that he would show me and he taught me how to fly. This experience only existed because I asked. We don’t ask because rejection is so painful and negative but that’s a lie we are telling ourselves.
A lot of us have dreams and ambitions, some of us want to be entrepreneurs and some of us just want to be successful in our careers. So what I found to be one of the biggest problems and my biggest problem was I was afraid of rejection. I was afraid of people saying no to me and I was so afraid of people’s opinions. This had such an impact on me that it started to dictate my life. Suddenly I found myself starting to conform with what others thought and live up to their expectations.
It first starts with my story and how I first got rejected with my investment and then how I told myself that I was going to look for rejection in order to toughen myself up to endure the pain. So that was my original goal but by everyday putting myself in front of people I discovered something amazing, some people will say yes to me. I would try to get people to say no and they would say yes. This raised the question to me, how many of these amazing moments are we missing in our lives? A great example from the book is from a day that I went to Krispy Kreme. I went and asked them to make me donuts that looked like Olympic rings, basically interlink five donuts to make them look like the Olympic symbol. I thought there was no way they would say yes to that but the donut maker took me very seriously and in fifteen minutes she gave me a box of donuts that looked like Olympic rings. At that moment my life completely changed and I thought, “how many Olympic donuts have I missed?” Because I didn’t ask, because I didn’t go seek, and I was always just rejecting myself before someone else even had the chance to reject me. From here I went out and decided to no longer care about rejection and I learned lessons about persuasion, communication, business, and negotiation.
NOTE: That was just a summary. To get the full deep dive, play the audio clip at 05:21
“Do what you are afraid of and you become much stronger.” -Jia Jiang
The inspiration came from me living through a pretty amazing story be learning to see rejection differently. I had always been afraid of rejection my entire life but on the other hand I was very ambitious and wanted to be an entrepreneur. Out of those two conflicting emotions, fear always seemed to win out. I didn’t start my first company until I was 30 years old and then at that point I was rejected with the investment and that’s when I decided that I was going to conquer this rejection thing once and for all. So I started a blog as a silly experiment called, 100 Days of Rejection, where I would go out and look for rejection. It ended up turning into something amazing as a lot of people chimed in, a lot of people ended up saying yes to me and I learned how to get people to say yes to me.
Influence by Robert Cialdini
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]]>A summary of things you should know about Leadership Lessons from the Race to The South Pole according to Fergus O’Connell Introduction (0:42) In college I studied mathematics and physicsRead More
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]]>In college I studied mathematics and physics and then I became a software person after that and sort of came up through the ranks. In 1992 I started my own company doing project management and consulting. In parallel with that I’ve written many books on project management and related subjects like time management and leadership.
If you do a search on Amazon about Amundsen or Scott you will probably get a million hits because there are a lot of books on this subject but no one has looked at it through the lens that I am speaking about of project management.
It can be done either way. What I did was structure the book in ten chapters and each chapter explains the ten elements of running a project smoothly. So it will explain what that element is and then using that as a benchmark it will compare Amundsen’s and Scott’s stories. So they can pick through the chapters to learn or they can read it front to back. There is also a little section at the end of each chapter where I explain how they can take each of those elements and apply it to their life.
I think it has to be this business of boxes and clouds, that they goal has to be clear. If the goal isn’t clear everything else kind of falls apart after that. If you don’t know the destination you are heading for then you can’t figure out the journey and you can’t estimate what has to be done. And if you can’t figure out what has to be done then you can have the biggest most skilled team in the world but it’s not going to make a difference if you don’t know precisely what they are meant to be doing.
Basically if anyone buys this book and reads it they will get a very common sense method of running a project successfully. There are lots of other methods out there and a lot of them are very complicated, this is a very common sense sort of method. It has a great track record and the biggest project that was ever applied was in 2003 when the Olympics were held in Ireland. The team of people that ran and executed that project used this method and a lot of them weren’t career project managers and this method very quickly gave them the tools they needed to run the project.
I will go through the tools needed, the essential elements. The very first thing, the goal of the project needs to be clear and bounded. Right from the get go Amundsen and Scott has very different objectives. Amundsen had a very clear goal, he wanted to get to the South Pole first, he wanted to beat Britain (Scott), and then get his people back alive. So it was simple and uncomplicated from the start. Now Scott by comparison wanted to get to the South Pole first but he didn’t think that much about getting his people back alive. His focus was mostly on beating Amundsen and he had some scientific work he wanted to do in Antartica. So you can see that Amundsen had a very clear goal and Scott had a cloudier goal with several elements. You see this when they are on their way back and Scott although running out of food and not getting as far as he needs each day makes stops to complete scientific work. So that was one of the most obvious ways that they were different.
So once you figure out the goal then, and if you think of the goal sort of as the destination of the journey, then what you have to do is estimate the thing properly. Amundsen and Scott were very different with this. Amundsen had a plan that he would cover 15 miles every day in his journey. So you can see that visually that is a very clear plan and what he did was travel these 15 miles and then stop whether it took them 5 hours or 20 hours. Instead of this, Scott’s team would get up in the morning and start pulling and didn’t stop until Scott told them to stop. And apparently Scott was a pretty physically powerful man and they would keep going until Scott was tired. So imagine this happens in the work place. You go into work and you just start working until the boss comes around and tells you to stop, that would be fairly unpleasant.
The next thing that is Scott and Amundsen had very different leadership styles. Scott had been brought up in the British Royal Navy and he had a very old fashioned leadership style and Amundsen had what we would regard as a very modern style. Both of them had styles that worked. Amundsen would really could relate to it more it now but Scott’s people followed him to the death so you can’t really say he’s a bad leader.
Another area was really laking and something you have to do in any project is risk analysis. You need to sort of derail your project. Scott had previous experience in Antartica and three things happened: an outbreak of scurvy, he had a difficult time finding food, and then he didn’t have enough food. So you would have thought that given this experience he would have prepared for them on his journey but all three of them happened again and it ended up killing them.
NOTE: That was just a summary. To get the full deep dive, play the audio clip at 05:59
“I thank you from my heart for your work, your commitment, your craft, your comradeship. I have no grand emotions, no profound thoughts to share with you. I have to confess, I experience the excitement of course but above all what I feel is not large or deep at all, it’s just how good it is to be alive.” -Amundsen
This is an extraordinary story because you rarely come across the same project that is carried out by two teams and one team is spectacularly successful and the other team really screws it up. Each teams effort was documented and the winning team (Amundsen’s team) when he got back he wrote a book about his journey and Scott’s diaries were found after his death. So it’s really the rarest of stories so that was the inspiration behind this.
On Becoming a Novelist by John Gardner
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]]>A summary of things you should know about Strategic Business Leadership according to Allen E. Fishman Introduction (0:35) I’m an entrepreneur and the company I have right now is notRead More
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]]>I’m an entrepreneur and the company I have right now is not the first company I’ve formed. My previous company I was part owner of went public and then I retired for a few years and then I started TAB, which is a membership organization for business owners of closely held businesses that now operates from eleven countries.
There are many very well done professional planning books out there but they don’t start where we start. With Strategic Business Leadership we first focus on the vision, the long term dreams of the entrepreneur. Everything works off of and must tie into the dreams of the entrepreneur. Those dreams may not be to have the most profitable business, the dreams may be to have something that allows them to have a certain lifestyle.
Secondly, every other strategic planning book out there focuses on get together and you start off with a couple of day retreat and you get your management team involved in everything top to bottom. But this doesn’t work with privately owned businesses. First of all, most of them do not have the time available to just drop everything and develop four to five major plans. So what I have done is worked off of coaching processes that are worked on over a period of time. It’s a twelve months we work on different pieces and then it circles around. For example, we start off with the personal vision and then we go into the point of having to have a personal business statement that is no less and no more than one hundred words. Only when that is done do we start going into the company vision statement. Then in another month we look at an in depth study of what we call the company merit, what many people refer to as the swan. What are the companies strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities? Because until we have that information we don’t even try to identify the critical success factors to making the company successful. So at a different month, not all at once, we try to look at what are these critical success factors that if they don’t happen then you won’t achieve the vision you have for your company. Once we have done that, in a different month, we get involved in what are the company plans. We talk about finding our goals that lead to succeeding with the critical success factors. Then another month we talk through exercises about what strategies are needed.
I’ve developed this book based off of three different sized company case studies so as we go through each of these factors we have examples from a larger company, one from the million to five million dollar level, and we have one that’s below a million dollars. We do this because how they do their planning changes greatly and even the amount of plans they have differs greatly.
NOTE: That was just a summary. To get the full deep dive, play the audio clip at 03:36
I would say for an entrepreneur to take the time to develop a written personal vision statement. Everything that you do in your business should lead towards attaining that. What we find is that it is rare if ever that an entrepreneur already has one. So I would say if you do anything then take the time to read that chapter and develop a personal vision statement.
“The unique vision an individual business owner has may not be maximizing profits and potential selling price.” – Allen Fishman
I started TAB in 1990, I had a background that was with bigger businesses than most sized businesses for privately owned companies. With a big business that’s a public company we were able to spend a lot of time with our managers and focus intensely on strategic planning. That’s not a reality for private companies unless they get very big. So what I did was adapt the key elements of strategic planning and all the realities that are involved that make private business different. Recognizing that entrepreneurs are not driven the same way as someone that’s part of a public company. I tried to come up with something that with bite sizes could become digestible by a privately owned business.
Taking People With You: The Only Way to Make Big Things Happen by David Novak
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]]>A summary of things you should know about Simple Rules according to Kathleen Eisenhardt Introduction (00:36) I’m on the faculty at Stanford in the School of Engineering and I’m alsoRead More
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]]>I’m on the faculty at Stanford in the School of Engineering and I’m also the Co-Director of Stanford’s Technology Ventures Program. I’ve been deeply embedded in the Silicon Valley entrepreneur scene but also in entrepreneurship US-wide and even global.
We have time to look at a lot of different entrepreneurial companies and we also have the time to think about it. We also focus on this idea simple rules. The idea is that in a key process, like hiring or marketing, what are the few simple rules that are really your strategy? And finally, we are a book that’s about scaling. So not a book for when you need an idea but for when you have one and you want to get it out there fast. We are focused on growing your business once you have the idea.
We did write it to be read cover to cover. However, if you are one of those people that doesn’t have a lot of time then you can read the first chapter to understand what simple rules are and then chapter 5 which explains how to create them.
I think the key concept is a few simple rules tames the complexity that everybody faces. They win because they’re fast, they’re flexible, and everyone can remember them.
What you will read first is what simple rules are, they are a handful of rules that are unique to you that are focused on a key process. We then go into why do simple rules work? They work because they’re fast, they’re flexible and easy to follow.
Once we have a good basics of what simple rules are for the reader, we then want to talk about the different kinds of rules. There are actually six kinds of rules ranging from boundary rules to stopping rules. We explain the six kinds of rules and why it’s important to know the kind. One reason is because by knowing the kind you will have a more effective portfolio of the rule. The second is because some rules are actually harder to learn but more important for performance.
Once we have run through what rules are, how they work, different kinds of rules, we then get into where they come from. Here we talk a bit about how they naturally appear if you don’t pay attention. Then we move into a three step process that really goes through how to actually develop those rules. The first step is ‘what’s your objective?.’ The second step is ‘What’s my bottle neck?’ and the third step is figuring out how to attack it.
NOTE: That was just a summary. To get the full deep dive, play the audio clip at 05:19X
“Complexity isn’t destiny.” – Kathleen Eisenhardt
The inspiration came from some research I did awhile ago. I was looking at tech companies and how some could put out products that were successful and others couldn’t. We noticed that there were two pathologies: people that had too much structure in their company and then people that had too little. Then we started to notice that most entrepreneurs are coping with fast paced, complicated, uncertain environments and those entrepreneurs that were successful were the ones that were able to crystalize what they were doing with a few rules and then improvise after that.
The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg
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]]>A summary of things you should know about Stand Out according to Dorie Clark Introduction (0:33) I live in New York City and I spend my time doing a mixtureRead More
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]]>I live in New York City and I spend my time doing a mixture of things these days. I write books, I teach in the school of business at Duke University, and I do a lot of speaking and marketing strategy consulting as well.
What I really tried to do with Stand Out was create a comprehensive road map so that professionals can become a recognized expert in their fields. I don’t actually believe that it’s been done in this fashion. I interviewed top leaders and great business thinkers and tried to create a step-by-step framework that if people follow it can enable them to make a bigger impact with their ideas, get traction, and begin to get better known.
Folks can definitely pick up Stand Out and dive in wherever they would like. I really divided the book into three major sections: finding your breakthrough idea, building a following around your idea, and how to monetize your ideas.
One of the people that I interviewed is a guy named Anthony Chan who is a venture capitalist in Boston. And a couple of years ago he wrote a book called, Hearts, Smarts, Guts, and Luck, and the book is a result of a study that he did. As a VC, Tony was really interested in the question, “what makes entrepreneurs successful?” So he and his partners interviewed thousands of people to try to determine this. What they came up with is that there are four principle personality types that entrepreneurs have: heart driven, smart driven, guts driven, or luck driven. This luck was the part that confused me at first because what does that even mean? It turns out that when Tony looked into it, the luck driven entrepreneurs had something very powerful in common which is that they had a disproportional amount of curiosity and humility. And I think this is so critical because really what happened is because they were curious about other people and they were humble enough to realize they had something to learn from everybody, it made them more likely to engage with folks that others may just pass by. So years later when that random person is important everyone is thinking “oh they are so lucky that they got to meet that person,” but really everyone else had the chance to but didn’t. They are lucky because they are more willing to talk to everyone and learn from them and I think the more we incorporate that in our lives the more successful we will be.
So what I really tried to do in Stand Out was profile and tell the stories of the people that I really found most interesting, folks that I wanted to learn from. I think one of the problems that we have is the way that we often talk about success, people gloss over and the media glosses over that moment of what people did to become successful. Instead people are presented as an overnight success or like they’ve just always been successful from the beginning of time. So the moment that they actually do become successful gets skipped and a lot of people are left thinking, “well, they just must be different than me, they must be a special person. I can’t do that.” And I really wanted to break down that barrier by telling the stories of how people were able to create these ideas and get recognized for them.
One that really stands out for me is I interviewed Robert Cialdini, who is one of the great behavioral psychologists most famous for his book, Influence. So in his interview he was telling me that he devised this framework of the six principles of influence and persuasion. No one had ever organized it that way before and the way that he actually came upon it was that he did undercover work. He went undercover in sales training programs and he learned to sell vacuum cleaners and encyclopedias and he went through all these different training programs so he could learn the proprietary trade secrets that companies were not sharing with anybody else. And at the end of the session he would go to them and say he was sorry that he wasn’t really interested in training to sell their product but he was actually a researcher. He would agree to not use the company name but he asked if he could report on the techniques and results that he learned in the training process and everybody said yes. So through this undercover field research he was able to devise something that no one had ever come up with before.
NOTE: That was just a summary. To get the full deep dive, play the audio clip at 03:54
“You have something to say to the world, you have a contribution to make.” -Dorie Clark
The inspiration for writing Stand Out was really stemming from my own experience as someone who worked as a marketing strategy consultant in a world where there are tons of consultants out there. I wanted to understand personally how I could become known as one of the best in the field. I wanted to get behind this question of, how do you stand out? So in writing the book I had the opportunity to interview about 50 top thought leaders from a variety of different fields to really look at how the best in the business got to be that way. I wanted to really reverse engineer the process and reveal it so that other people could get out there and make a mark with their ideas.
Never Eat Alone by Keith Ferrazzi
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]]>A summary of things you should know about The Four Steps to the Epiphany according to Steve Blank Introduction (0:34) I am an eight time serial entrepreneur. I’ve done eightRead More
The post TEL 246: The Four Steps to the Epiphany with Steve Blank appeared first on The Entrepreneurs Library.
]]>I am an eight time serial entrepreneur. I’ve done eight different start ups in a series of ever increasing roles and after I retired I became an educator and started teaching at Berkley in the business school, Stanford in the engineering school, and now at Columbia and NYU as well. From there, I wrote a series of books about entrepreneurship.
It was the first of its kind and people have said it’s a foundational entrepreneurial book to read before the others. But I think this book helps you get grounded, meaning it allows you to process everything else you read, helping you understand where these ideas are coming from and how are they derived and which ones are important.
The first three chapters are definitely worth reading at first in one bite because they talk about what has become the lean startup and how to manage this advice. And then it talks about the first two steps, which are customer discovery and customer validation. Customer discovery is how to take your brilliant idea of your company and break it down into very simple pieces that are hypotheses. Customer validation is then going and testing these hypotheses. So this is just a fancy term for let’s get some orders from customers way before we ever ship a product.
The other chapters in the book are about what happens after you actually find what’s called, product-market, fit. They discuss customer creation and also company building, so what to do when you actually are successful.
There are no facts inside your building so get the hell outside. Founders are driven by a passion that they want to share with others, the problem is the passion convinces you so deeply that you’re right, that a startup becomes a faith based enterprise.
The other thing about the book is that there is a whole set of checklists and worksheets in the back of the book that help you figure out what to do step-by-step. And the book is a good preamble for reading my next book, The Startup Owner’s Manual, which truly is a step by step guide. This book has The Four Steps to the Epiphany with a lot more philosophy on why to do it. But I think The Four Steps is the first book I would hand a first-time or even second- or third-time entrepreneur who is looking for guidance. One of the biggest problems with entrepreneurship today is the cost of entry is so low that most people believe that if they just go out and build it and follow my passion then users and money will follow. It turns out that unless you’re randomly lucky then that’s almost never the case, it really does require preparation and some legwork to make that happen.
NOTE: That was just a summary. To get the full deep dive, play the audio clip at 12:03
“There are no facts inside the building so get the hell outside” -Steve Blank
“Startups search, large companies execute” -Steve Blank
The inspiration around Four Steps is when I retired I felt that the world really needed my memoir and so I started writing lessons learned from each of the start ups I had been in. When I got about 80 pages into the memoir I realized two things: one is I would have to pay my kids to read it, let alone anyone else, and two is that there was a pattern emerging from the book and my career that I never knew existed. Then I realized what happened to me was happening to everyone else and that was that all the common wisdom of how to start a business that was given to us by our investors was simply wrong. The advice they had given us was that start ups are nothing more than smaller versions of big companies so everything these large companies do are things we should do. When really startups are searching for a business model rather than executing one like a larger company.
Business Model Generation by Alexander Osterwalder
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