Beyond Entrepreneurship 2.0

40 min readMay 22, 2023

Beyond Entrepreneurship 2.0 — Turning Your Business into an Enduring Great Company

By Jim Collins & Bill Lazier

Why Do the Impossible?

Knowing the overwhelming odds that are stacked against startups surviving let alone succeeding, why in the world would you embark on something that has a high chance of failure? Deciding to start your own business requires a leap of faith, pushing yourself out of your Comfort Zone, and doing something about what bothers you the most by trying something new. If that idea excites you enough to make a move, why wait around at a safe job and watch the opportunity pass you by? Starting your own business is a lot of work and there are some risks involved at each stage, but the potential for reward is huge!

If working eight to five isn’t cutting it for you, then perhaps it’s time for you to climb your own ladder, set a pace that suits you, and make your mark in the world. Today’s interconnected world has opened-up lots of new niches for entrepreneurs to start small businesses, and countless other resources for advice are available at the palm of your hands. Since the age of information is long behind us in the presence of Google and Bing, we’ve entered a new era of the Digital Age, where the internet has enabled business owners to connect with their peers, broaden their horizon, and avoid making the same mistakes that others have made.

To make near impossible dreams come true, there comes a moment when you need to take a leap of faith and go all in fully committed with no easy way out or turning back. It becomes do or die because most people fail to achieve their Big Hairy Audacious Goals in life (BHAGs) because they don’t fully commit to whatever they’ve set their hearts on when the going gets tough.

To make a lasting impact in the world, you can either forgo the certainty of making your life a pretty painting that amuses people at best, or you can start with a blank canvas with seemingly endless possibilities, where you just might paint a masterpiece that mesmerizes people! The choice is yours…

Based on my experience, deciding to start my own business took me through a wild rollercoaster ride, where it started as euphoric, then quickly transitioned into disappointment and despair, and just when all hope seemed to be lost; something unexpected happened and a breakthrough manifested itself out of thin air. In fact, there were days when things got so bad and bleak that I started questioning why am I putting-up with all this crap! Looking back, it all came down to one simple question that kept nagging in my head: “Is the pain worth the gain?” 9 times out of 10, the answer was YES!

This book isn’t a cookbook recipe of how to start your own business, rather, it’s about the mindset that you need to adapt in order for you to build an enduring company that would stand the test of time, lasts for years to come long after your gone, and elevate your contributions to the level of greatness.

A company doesn’t need to be perfect in order for it to be great because no great company in recorded history is anywhere close to perfect! Great companies are resilient, which allows it to bounce back from difficult periods. To build a great company, you need to do the 4 following activities:

Clearly articulate your Vision both internally and externally using simple words.
Instill your Leadership style by developing an ambitious Vision that emanates from your heart.
Develop an Execution Strategy plan by leveraging suitable Technologies.
Execute your articulated Vision that is driven by your Leadership style and planned using your Execution Strategy that leverages the use of Technologies, and implement them using Tactical Excellence.

When done correctly, your efforts towards trying to do something great would result in the recipe needed to build an enduring great company that is characterized by the following four criteria:

Stellar Financial Performance
Measurable Market Impact
Strong Brand Recognition
Continuous Improvement Mindset leading to Longevity

To build an enduring great company, you need to take the road less traveled. I caution you, if you spend your life keeping your options open, that’s exactly what you’ll end-up doing; continuing to wait indefinitely. Just like a great painting reflects the inner values of the artist, entrepreneurial success shouldn’t be primarily about what you do, but more about who you are and what you stand for; your values.

Based on my experience, when you tether success with money, you end-up losing in the long haul. Nobody enters into business without the intention of making money, so it’s a given, but it should never be the goal. That’s because I’ve never met anybody who buys a car for the sole purpose of filling it with gas! People buy cars for multiple reasons, but never to just fill it with Gas. The entrepreneurial mindset is the same way, where money is equivalent to fuel, destination is equivalent to vision, and the vehicle is equivalent to the company and its people. The standards that are used to build the car itself is equivalent to your Core Values, where values come before goals, strategy, tactics, products, services, and before business plans. Values always come first in both life and in business. Life has taught me that living your Core Values is often inconvenient, almost always costly, and always demanding, but it’s well worth the pain you have to endure.

This book summary will address the following 5 topics in further detail:

Setting Your Vision
Discovering Your Leadership Style
Developing Your Strategy
Leveraging Technology
Managing Tactical Excellence

Now, let’s delve into each of the 5 elements of what it takes to build an enduring great company that will last for centuries to come…

1. Setting Your Vision

One of the most vital roles of a great leader is to develop a clear and shared vision for the company, and to secure commitment towards pursuing that vision. So, is vision really that important? In what visceral ways can you think of vision? How do you go about setting your vision? What’s the difference between vision and mission?

Think of vision as an aspiration towards a utopian world that you aspire to achieve. For example, your vision could be wanting to climb the highest mountain in the world, and every mountain that you overcome could be thought of as the different missions that you set for yourself in pursuit of your ambitious vision. Your purpose is your North Star; always out there on the horizon, never attainable, but always drawing you in towards it. Your mission on the other hand is the specific mountains that you have to climb at any given moment. Once you’ve conquered the mountain that you’re climbing (Mission), you quickly gaze your sight towards your North Star (Vision), and you set your sight towards the next mountain that you need to conquer (next Mission). You always begin with Vision, then move towards Strategy, and then execute with Tactics.

Believe it or not, most people want to do more than just bringing home a paycheck, where they want to do something meaningful and answer a higher calling. This is obviously not true of all people, but it’s definitely true for those who wake-up every morning trying to make the world better than it was yesterday. People will become self-motivated when they do work that they believe in. Motivation depends greatly on the extent of which a person can frame their work within a broader overall purpose.

Strategy is impossible without setting your vision first and foremost. That’s because strategy is how you intend ongoing about attaining a desired end. Strategy can be thought of as the means to an end, and that’s why it’s near impossible to have an effective strategy unless you have a clear and well-articulated vision. Think of strategy as a path to reach your vision because knowing “How” to get there is impossible if you can’t articulate what “There” really is. I’ll bet you top dollar that almost every significant organizational problem, I mean chronic problems, can be traced back to the company’s lack of a clear, well-articulated, and meaningful vision. That’s because having a clear vision is how you can rally a crowd of unique individuals around you to help get you through the treacherous path that lies ahead.

Tell me if this sounds familiar: you work at an organization that is bogged with turf wars, territorial empire building, mind numbing & crippling politics, finger-pointing, credit claiming, silo operations, and information hoarding. Does some or any of this applies to your organization? Vision is the link between unleashing individual creativity and moving the organization in a unified direction. Unless the vision is shared amongst the team as a community, Different members will wander-off in different directions based on their interpretation of how they see the vision executed. I guess you can imagine how things will turn-out at the end when the vision is fuzzy.

Vision is composed of 3 basic elements that create the framework for building a great enduring company:

Core Values & Beliefs: This is where vision begins, your core values and beliefs serve as the ether that permeates your organization’s direction, policies, and actions throughout all phases of it’s evolution. The source of core values and beliefs emanate from within the organization’s leader, where in most cases they’re merely an extension of the leaders own core values that they hold dear to their heart. Regardless of what you claim, core values and beliefs grow into becoming the organization’s culture based on what you do, not what you say.
Purpose: Is what grows organically out of your core values and beliefs. Purpose is the main reason your company exists in the first place, which is what gives meaning to the work that is being executed at the company. A good purpose statement is broad, fundamental, inspirational, emotional, easy to understand & articulate, and enduring. All companies have purpose, but what sets great companies apart is that their purpose is well articulated and applied at all levels of the organization. That’s because great companies realize that purpose is a motivating factor and NOT a differentiating factor. It’s entirely possible that two companies have the same purpose, yet one of them thrives while the other is mediocre at best. What differentiates a great company from others is how they apply their mission statement.
Mission (Big Hairy Audacious Goals — BHAGs): Is a clear and compelling overall goal that serves as a focal point of the collective effort of the organization. Unlike purpose that is an unachievable aspiration, a mission statement should be achievable and time bound. A mission statement can be thought of as the translation of values and purpose into an energized and highly focused goal. Mission statements should require no explanation and use simple language, and once a mission is fulfilled, you go back to your purpose to set a new mission. Mission statements should compel people to act, so an indication that you might have a boring mission statement is when big words are used that don’t evoke response to act. A good mission statement should have an element of genuine passion and is difficult to achieve, where there should be a chance where you might fail combined with a firm belief that you’ll push yourself beyond your perceived limit to make it anyway. Your mission statement needs to be a BHAG, where the best BHAG makes you think big by forcing you to engage in both long-term building and short-term intensity with a clear sense of urgency.

When you reach the top of your mountain peak (mission — BHAG), the wheels should have been set in motion for the next mountain to conquer because if you sit still and try to relax too long, you’ll end up getting frostbites and eventually freeze to death. Whatever you do in life, just keep-on moving! Just Do It!

When it comes to your vision, which elements should remain rigid or flexible?

Core Values & Beliefs: Should never change.
Purpose: Should last for 100-years and tweaked periodically
Mission — BHAG: Changes whenever one mission is accomplished and a new one is set (usually every 10 to 25 years)
Strategy: Updated annually
Tactics: In constant flux with an embedded mechanism to ensure continuous improvement and adoption to changing conditions in the market.

2. Discovering Your Leadership Style

The only way you could build an enduring company that makes great products and services is to have the Right People working in the Right Culture! Get the Right People on the Bus, have them sit in their appropriate seat, then figure-out where you want to go. You need the right people on your Bus far more than you need the right business idea; especially that most business ideas fail anyway. First “Who” then “What.”

One of the most important decisions you could ever make as a business owner or leader is choosing the right people who have the greatest potential, and not necessarily the ones who have the greatest skills. Heck, you could start with a bad idea, but if you have a great team, you’ll end-up having great results! We can neither predict nor govern the future because uncertainty is chronic, instability is permanent, and disruption is inevitable.

So, how would you know that you’ve made the right or wrong decision in choosing the people on your team? When is the right time to shift your focus from “Developing” to “Replacing” some of the people on your team? When you face the “Develop” or “Replace” conundrum, consider the following 7 questions:

Are you beginning to lose other people by keeping this person around?
Do you have a value problem, “will” problem, or a skill problem?
What’s the person’s attitude towards blame and responsibility (blaming themselves or others) when things go astray?
Does the person see work as a job or a responsibility?
Has your confidence in the person gone up or down in the past year?
Do you have a “Bus” problem or a “Seat” problem?
How would you feel if the person quits tomorrow?

If you want to grow your people, you have to grow yourself first! Most great leaders hardly ever start-off as great leaders. In fact, most great leaders of history were lousy leaders when they first started-off their careers. Most exceptional leaders grow into their capabilities; not because they want to be great leaders, but because they’re trying to be worthy of the people they lead.

I personally never saw myself as a leader; especially when I first started my professional career at the age of 21, but I feel that I was thrusted into this role when the situation demanded it! My leadership style started to coalesce and form when I wanted my team to improve their performance and realize their untapped potential. I wanted my team to push themselves beyond their perceived limits.

To do that, I had to first push myself beyond my own perceived limits, and challenge myself every day. In fact, I would never ask my team to do something that I wouldn’t do myself, where I’ve chosen to lead by “Doing” instead of “Saying” because just like children, people emulate what they see far more than what they hear. I had to first expand my own capabilities before I could expect that of my team.

To understand the leadership style of the greatest leaders of our time who’re emulated by millions from around the world, we need to study their journey into leadership as a “Growth” story instead of a “Success” story. I’ve never met anyone in my entire life who has learned much from their successes because it only ends-up feeding their ego and they play it down with humbleness. The real lessons in life stick with us when we examine our own reaction and that of the greats before us during setbacks, disappointments, and feelings of despair.

Accomplishments in themselves bring little meaning; let alone lasting satisfaction, but the pursuit of accomplishment with the right people on the Bus can produce amazing satisfaction. Leaders need to be courageous, and courage isn’t defined as the absence of fear, rather, it’s the ability to act in the presence of fear. You can’t get rid of fear no matter how fearless you think you are; you just have to develop the skills necessary to manage it well; especially when under pressure or when things come crumbling down.

Leadership is a responsibility; not a prestige, a conscious decision; not an accident, and acquired skills; not genetic gifts. Leadership is a choice, management is a role and an assigned position; the choice is yours, so choose wisely for your own sake and that of your own team. I’ve learned that when I take care of my people, they take care of my career and my company, and they would go out of their way to see me succeed because they see how their success is tethered to mine.

When done right, the relationship between a leader and his team is synonymous to the threads in a beautifully woven fabric that seems to be fused together to form a great piece of garment. In our darkest hours and deepest despair during the early years of DarTec Engineering when the company was on the verge of bankruptcy, my team simply never gave-up on me! My team would not let me fail and continued to support me against overwhelming odds that were stacked against us. My team’s faith in me during difficult times forced me to try even harder to succeed so that I don’t let them down.

I’ve learned that if you need financial incentives to motivate people, you have the wrong people on the Bus. If you really want to motivate people, you need to first get the right people with great potential on board, then you need to give them something big to do. Financial incentives cannot cause companies to achieve greatness for the same reasons you cannot turn the wrong people into the right people with money. Think of it this way, if someone needs financial incentives to perform at an elevated level, they lack inner drive to achieve greatness.

The nail in the coffin of your “Doom Loop” is when you get some of the wrong people on the Bus who behave toxically, and their behavior metastasizes through the veins and arteries of your company’s culture. Some of these wrong people move into positions of power and instill incentives that are contradictory to your core values. This ends-up incentivizing the wrong people to continue their toxic behavior and before you know it; the right people are forced out of the organization. Consequently, the culture becomes dominated by the wrong people who end-up driving the organization down a rabbit hole. Once the number of wrong people on the Bus reaches a critical mass, you end-up waking one day to the horrifying realization that the culture has been completely eroded to the point of no return.

We usually give our best performance when other people depend on us to come through, which is reciprocal between the leader and their team because they don’t want to let each other down. We live in a world that’s rich in success, but poor in meaning, where a life of relentless work without meaning is a hollow and dark one.

The primary barrier to greatness in most companies is poor leadership. In most industries, if you have the best technologies, best people, and the best strategy but lack leadership, you’re failure becomes eminent and its only a matter of time before your house of cards comes crumbling down. All it would take is a dip in the economy to bring your company down. It’s near impossible to build a great and enduring company if you have a corrosive leadership style.

When you’re the leader, your leadership style will set the tone for how people will behave. Your leadership style will be a function of your own unique personal characteristics. Don’t confuse leadership with charisma, because charisma does not equal leadership. Some of the greatest con artists in business were exceptionally charismatic people. You don’t need to be powerful and charismatic to inspire people to do great things. Don’t try to be someone you’re not or adopt a style that doesn’t fit who you really are. Your affective leadership style will grow from within you, where it should be entirely yours and no one else but you should have a style exactly like yours.

There are 5 distinctive levels of leadership that all great leaders go through:

Level 1: Individual skills
Level 2: Teamwork skills
Level 3: Management skills
Level 4: Leadership skills
Level 5: Serve a higher cause that’s larger than oneself

Effective leadership consists of two main parts: Leadership Function & Leadership Style. The leadership function consists of clear and shared vision for the company and secured commitment by members of the team in pursuit of that vision. On the other hand, leadership style is unique to each individual, where there could be many styles to execute the function of leadership. Here’s something I’ve learned about leadership, if you want to know whether a person is an effective leader or not, observe their people’s behavior on whether or not they would follow them if they had the freedom not to. Let that sink in for a moment before you proceed on reading.

Leadership is the art of inspiring people to want to do great things by overcoming insurmountable challenges by pushing themselves beyond their perceived limits. Having said that, there are 7 elements of leadership style that are usually found in effective leaders:

Authenticity: Is about living the vision of the company because unless the leader embodies the company’s values through their actions instead of using hollow words, no one would ever follow them into the depths of hell that are inevitable for any company to experience. Live what you say, don’t just talk about it.
Decisiveness: The ability to come to a decision even in the absence of perfect information. The greatest threat to decisiveness is fear, where a fear-driven decision can prevent you from making the decision that you know deep down inside your heart is the right one.
Focus: Effective leaders focus their efforts on keeping the number of priorities that they have at a given time to a minimum by remaining fixated on them. There’s a huge difference between managing time and managing work, where work is infinite but time is finite. Try as you may, there are only 24-hours in the day. Trust me, I’ve tried to push it to 25-hours, but it didn’t work. In order for you to be productive, you must manage your time instead of your work.
Personal Touch: Leaders who built great companies our hands on, where they always have a pulse on their operations and a personal touch on what the business has to offer. If you ever want to achieve greatness, you have to get out from behind your desk every once in a while and see for yourself what’s going on in the field.
People Skills: Great leaders are masters of the paradox of hard and soft skills, where they hold people to incredibly high standards of performance (hard); yet they go to even greater lengths to develop their people and make them feel good about themselves (soft).
Communication: It’s unfortunate how many liters at companies are poor communicators and it’s not because they can’t communicate, rather, it’s because they communicate ineffectively. Communication within an organization shouldn’t always flow from the top down, it should also make its way up from foot soldiers in the field to upper management in the executive office.
Ever Forward: Great leaders are always moving forward and progressing as individuals, and they pass their ever forward psychology along to the company.

Never stop trying to become an effective leader, because you can always be better when you hold yourself to high standards. Never stop learning or developing your skills and remain routinely committed to the constant pursuit of higher standard and continuous improvement. As a leader, you need to pay close attention to your weaknesses, shortcomings, and mishaps. Ask your team for brutal feedback on areas where you are weak, so you know what to focus on improving. It’s never fun to hear your shortcomings and weaknesses pointed out to you, and it really hurts. That’s why most people tend to avoid getting feedback to protect themselves from being exposed. Just like disgusting medicine is good for you, so is brutal and honest feedback.

3. Developing Your Strategy

Strategy is the basic methodology that you apply to achieve your company’s mission. Just like life, business cannot be entirely planned nor should it be. There are far too many variables, uncertainties, and unforeseen opportunities to predict them all. That’s why it’s better to have a clear, thoughtful, and simple methodology for achieving your mission. Your strategy should entail a methodology that leaves no room for individual interpretations, ambiguity about responses to changing conditions, and how the different elements of the business work together.

There are 4 principles that you need to consider when setting-up your company strategy, where it should be:

Directly derived from your company’s vision.
Leverages the strengths and unique capabilities of your company by performing an internal assessment about your capabilities.
Realistic By taking into account internal constraints and external factors by performing an external assessment of the environment, market, competition, entrance-to-market strategy.
Should be set with the participation of your frontline soldiers who work in the field by challenging assumptions and the status quo.

There are 4 key strategic issues that most SMEs encounter as they move in their journey towards greatness:

Growth Rate & Expansion: I can’t stress enough the importance of needing to grow slow enough as an SME in order for you to develop good management skills to sustain your growth. If you push too fast, you end-up losing your values and your way because you’re driven by arrogance at that point. Cash is just like blood running in your veins and arteries, where without it you simply die. Growth eats cash like it’s running out of style.
Focus vs. Diversification: As lucrative and exciting as a market can be, it’s prudent that an SME focuses their efforts on a particular market or product line and become the best in the world at it. Being focused helps you avoid being a “me too” business and allows you to hone your craft. I’ve never seen any company suffer because they were too focused, but I’ve definitely seen many companies crumble down because they weren’t focused enough. Most companies eventually diversify, it just becomes a question of when and by how much.
Going Public or Remaining Private: This is a tough question to ask because most SMEs have no frame of reference to how this decision would impact their business. There are just way too many variables for an upcoming SME to fathom when trying to choose between remaining private or going public.
Lead or Follow the Market: As corny as it may sound, always strive to be both the first and the best. That’s because when you’re the first to enter a market and then continually work on improving your craft, you’ll be in a very strong position.

The biggest mistake I’ve seen when it comes to strategy and planning is over investing into planning the perfect strategy and not enough time executing, improving, and innovating. Paralysis by analysis is what I call it, and this is so prevalent in highly conservative industries. Experience has taught me that there needs to be some level of creative chaos in a healthy company that wants to set their sail towards greatness.

4. Leveraging Technology

When it comes to innovation, there’s no shortage of good ideas, what we lack is the execution of good ideas that would lead to developing great products or services. Most companies start off with a creative founder, and the challenge lies in how the company can become innovative and not solely dependent on its innovative founder.

There are 6 basic elements of what it takes to become an innovative company:

Receptivity to Ideas from Everywhere: contrary to popular belief, highly innovative companies aren’t generating more ideas than they’re less innovative counterparts, there are simply more receptive to ideas coming from anywhere at the company. It’s much more effective to act quickly on a partially baked idea than to spend countless hours deliberating about all the reasons why it can’t work. That should come as no surprise because we’re all schooled in criticism, where we’ve learned that the way to show how smart we are is to cite all the reasons that’s something is either stupid or impossible. Many great ideas were first thought to be the dumbest ideas in existence, but everything changes when they’re built and proven to work without a shadow of a doubt. As a leader, you need to strive towards creating an environment that is receptive to new ideas, where people shouldn’t fear voicing their opinion. Some of the most creative companies rely exclusively on ideas generated beyond the boundaries of their walls, where they assume the role of their customers to experience their products and services in action.
Becoming the Customer: Innovation is about finding the relationship between unconnected ideas by fusing them together to solve a problem or enhance performance in a given market. Most customers won’t tell you what they want because they can only see the results of what frustrates them about a product or a service, and it’s only when you show them what they can have that they jump all over it. Ignoring customer input can lead to missed opportunities or even disaster. Just because customers haven’t been asking for innovation doesn’t necessarily mean that they won’t be happy to see it when it’s offered to them. The best approach that I’ve come to learn when it comes to gaining insight about our products and services is the “touch-and-feel” approach, where I get as close as I can to the customer to experience their struggles and quantify them as much as possible.
Experimentation & Mistakes: One of the biggest challenges of innovation is that it’s shrouded in mystery and riddled with unknowns. So, the most effective way to know if something is a good idea or a bad one is to test it on a small scale and give it a test drive. This will most definitely lead to mistakes, but here is the kicker; the mistakes and setbacks are an integral part of the innovation process. Innovation requires experimentations and mistakes, where you can’t have one without the other! Most if not all of the greatest inventions ever made in recorded human history happened by accident because someone was brave enough to give it a try. If you truly believe in something, just do it because it’s far easier to ask for forgiveness then to ask for permission.
People being Creative: If you want your company to be innovative, hire unusual people with strong technical acumen and a couple of missing screws. People can be creative only when their leader cultivates a culture that tolerates mistakes and allows testing new ideas possible. When people become consumed with conventional wisdom, they become a threat to innovation and growth. There is a symbiotic relationship between growth and the willingness to try something new because you simply don’t know what is the next best thing until you’ve tried it. Most of the innovative ideas out there fly in the face of conventional wisdom and sometimes contradict it outright. The biggest obstacle to creativity and innovation is conventional wisdom or what is also known as the status quo. While knowledge and experience are valuable, they could also be a liability. That’s why its crucial to have a delicate balance between experienced knowledge and fresh perspectives in order to challenge the validity of conventional wisdom today instead of a decade ago.
Autonomy & Decentralization: To foster a culture of creativity and innovation, you have to have autonomy. That’s why you need to hire good people, create an environment for them to work at, and then get out of their way. Never hire smart people and then tell them how to do their job! Give them guidelines and a goal, but then quickly; step out of their way and avoid micromanagement. You can’t afford micromanaging people if you want to attain consistent results. People tend to do their worst work when they know someone is looking over their shoulders. Here is an interesting fact for people who work in corporate, you can’t have creativity and innovation with centralization because it stifles progress and choke the flexibility that’s required in creativity. Now, let that sink-in a bit and simmer in your head before you carry-on reading. The best way to decentralize operations while maintaining order at an organization is by breaking the company into smaller semi-autonomous chunks, where you could maintain the strength of a large company; while retaining the flexibility and speed of a small business. This approach helps simulate an entrepreneurial spirit within the overall corporate umbrella. The only way this decentralization approach would work is if you have a shared vision amongst different groups with no silos in sight. If you ever want the lightning bolt of innovation to strike twice at the same place, you have to be comfortable living with ambiguity, inefficiencies, and anxiety.
Rewards: How you punish and reward people is what creates your culture. Rewards matter and you have to reward people if you want to remain innovative. This is not to say that creative people are solely motivated by money, power, and prestige, far from it. As a matter of fact, creative people are usually motivated by the desire for interesting work, solving challenging problems, and the joy of contribution and making a difference.

The fear of being criticized is the biggest impediment to creativity. The problem isn’t that people are inherently uncreative, it’s that people are afraid to be creative. It’s the deeply rooted fear that we all carry around since the first grade in elementary school. How you deal with mistakes and failure greatly influences people’s creativity. Quite people are usually excellent observers and thinkers, but they’re also the most fearful of voicing their opinion and ideas.

The most creative people ask many open-ended questions as if they’ve never outgrew their childlike curiosity. That’s why it’s important that leaders create an environment that makes it OK to ask questions without the fear of being ridiculed. Remember, a creative organization is a questioning organization. Based on my experience, your most creative ideas will never come to you while you’re sitting at the confines of your office behind a desk. Instead, creative ideas usually strike when you’re least expecting them, especially during moments of struggle, feeling trapped, or even helpless.

Time plays a major role in creating the pressure needed to become creative. On the flipside of things, fun can also lead to creativity because if there is no joy in what you do, there will be no creativity. The most creative people I’ve encountered in my life are childlike, who like to play with ideas and ask many questions. Creativity is hard work, but it doesn’t have to be boring. The wildest thing about creativity is that it’s inevitable to emerge. We might not know when, how, or even from where it would emerge, but it will most definitely come if we’re persistent enough.

5. Managing Tactical Excellence

All companies have culture, but very few have a culture of discipline and even fewer build a culture of discipline while sustaining the spirit of entrepreneurship. When you fuse these two complementary factors together, you get a magical alchemy of superior performance and sustained results. Once you have your vision and strategy in place, it’s necessary to translate them into a solid tactical execution plan. Getting things done is not the goal, rather it’s about getting things done right on time. Believe it or not, if your team isn’t executing well, it’s not really their fault; it’s yours. Great leaders have faith in their ordinary people to do extraordinary things by removing obstacles from their path.

There are 5 conditions under which people have the potential to execute their jobs well:

People are clear about what they need to do.
Having the right set of skills and knowledge for the job.
Working in a culture that fosters freedom and autonomy
People are appreciated for their efforts more than their results.
People see the importance of their work.

People can see the importance of their work when they know that other people are depending on them. I get the best results out of my team when I compliment them by saying: “Thanks for being dependable.” If you want to see extraordinary performance from your people, show them the importance of what they’re doing and create an atmosphere where people are dependent on each other to get the job done right. That’s why I always prefer having cross functional KPIs instead of departmental KPIs to avoid creating a culture with many silos. People pay attention to that which is measured.

People will usually rise to the occasion if they’re given a chance! As a leader, it’s your job to foster a culture where every single person at the organization is doing something important, and that person knows wholeheartedly why their job matters. Based on my experience, one of the main factors contributing towards extreme job satisfaction is personal achievement, not how much you make every month. That’s because people want to achieve great results by setting goals and reaching them, and it’s your job as a leader to foster that culture to ensure consistent tactical excellence.

If you want to achieve tactical excellence, you need to keep track of these 5 critical pieces of records:

Financial records (Cash Flow (projected vs. actual), Balance Sheet, and Income Statement)
Financial ratios (ROI, IRR, EBITA, and Profit & Losses — P&L)
Cost of goods sold
Sales information
Customer information

I personally meet with my financial manager 3 to 4 times a week for both of my companies to make sure that we always have a tight grip over our financials. I used to make business decisions based on technical acumen, which nearly destroyed my company many times over. It wasn’t until I started relying on financial records and projections that I started to make sound decisions.

Lucky Star

What I find peculiarly interesting about business is that most people are so focused on success and attaining wealth that they can’t imagine themselves in situations where they’re likely to grow through the process of failure. Life has taught me that the only way to discover your purpose is by pushing yourself beyond your perceived limits and in the painful process of repeated failures and setbacks, you end-up stumbling over your purpose. You have to be willing to go through the journey that will involve a series of cumulative failures, where a part of you has to die in order for you to come-out a changed person on the other side. You just have to have faith in the process of learning by doing.

So, how much of success is credited to luck vs. effort? In what ways can you define luck? Is it like something that is ordained, freak accident of nature, or folklore and fairy tales that makes us sleep better at night? A lucky event must meet 3 criteria:

You didn’t cause it
Has significant consequences (good or bad)
Involves an element of surprise

The greatest leaders weren’t generally luckier than the average person, instead, they had a better Return on Luck — ROL! Put simply, luck is what happens when opportunity meets preparation, and you got to bust your tail to grab an opportunity when it comes knocking because it won’t wait for too long. Luck is not a bolt of lightning that strikes some people more than others.

Great leadership is defined by what you do with what happens to you, especially when it’s unexpected and the odds are mounted against you. It might sound counterintuitive, but overcoming bad luck an early setbacks might actually increase the odds of building an enduring great company. It’s much better to experience early failure and learn how to systematically innovate than to merely have one big mega hit. Bad luck can kill you, but good luck cannot make you great. Luck doesn’t build great companies that would last, people do. You need to make a conscious effort to be great, and that role is reserved for those who pushed themselves harder than anyone else in their industry.

The secret to having a better Return on your Luck is to be prepared for what you cannot control or predict, and to be strong enough to weather the storms that will inevitably come. While persistence can’t guarantee success, nothing great in life ever comes from a single monumental event. Nonetheless, luck favors the persistent. If you somehow weather success at your company with a specific idea, then you can expect to get disappointed if the idea fails or doesn’t work. If, however, that idea happened to succeed, you’ll fall in love with that idea and stick with it for far too long. When you cling-on to an idea for too long, you become blinded from seeing other lucrative opportunities because you prefer to stick with the formula that worked in the past. While this is all fine and dandy, this strategy does not hold water when the economy tanks or if a significant shift happens in the market.

Here is a fascinating idea to ponder on, big doesn’t necessarily mean great, and great doesn’t equal big. When it’s all said and done, business performance is dictated by financial results. You could have the cure to cancer, but if your numbers don’t jive; you don’t have a business that would last. One of the most common mistakes that I see in way too many organizations is that their people are unwilling or even outright afraid to highlight unpleasant truths, but who can blame them? The unspoken rule in most corporate companies is that middle management doesn’t want to see anything negative that might paint them in a negative light in front of their leadership; even if what needs to be presented is the ugly truth. More often than not, middle managers prefer wearing rose-colored glasses than facing reality, where they end-up filtering-out potential threats to the organization. These toxic middle-managers are willing to put the company at risk because they’re more interested in keeping their jobs, which ironically might disappear altogether if things go astray.

Making a Difference

When it’s all said and done, people want to be part of something that they could be proud of. People want to challenge themselves and they want opportunities to show what they’re capable of doing. People will rise to the occasion when other people depend on them. People will do extraordinary work when they’re respected, and it’s your responsibility as a leader to foster an environment that allows people to perform at their best. It’s also your job as a leader to coach your team into realizing their greatest potential by giving them the tools necessary to find greatness that lies within them to make a difference.

What sets SMEs on a trajectory path towards greatness is the leaders respect towards their team. Great leaders respect their people, respect their customers, respect themselves, and respect their relationships. The manifestation of respect between leaders and their team is through trust. Great leaders respect their people and expect high-performance from them by setting high standards and challenging goals because they believe that their people can rise to the occasion. People at extraordinary great companies attain consistent tactical excellence because someone believes in them, and that certain person is usually their leader.

My goal through the two companies that I’ve built along with my partners is that I can look back one day at the end of my life and say: “I’ve given it my best, I’m proud of what I did, I’ve worked with a great team, and we’ve made a difference in people’s lives.” That’s what I’d like to leave behind because all of the struggles, trials, tribulations, and near-death experiences that we’ve gone through as a struggling technology-based SME would’ve counted for something. If I manage to achieve this BHAG, my life would be well spent, and if I can do it, so can you!

Takeaways

Life is too short not to enjoy what you’re doing, so don’t waste your life pushing boxes by being a cog in a large machine.
Greatness is a dynamic process that continuously changes form, and not an endpoint.
There is no true success without being successful in how you live your life.
One of the greatest threats to any company’s longevity is having its leader operate as a genius with 1000 helpers.
“There is no honorable way to fail a commitment freely made.” ~ Bill Lazier
To build an enduring great company, you need to take the road less traveled.
Your company has a responsibility towards everyone it touches.
Business transactions can give you success, but only relationships offer you a great life.
If you want to be truly original, see things as they are instead of how you’d like them to be.
Great leaders take care of themselves physically, emotionally, and spiritually.
If you were to ask each person in a business relationship who benefits the most from the relationship and both were to answer that they do, know wholeheartedly that you have a great relationship.
The best form of relationships is that where both parties contribute so much to the relationship that both feel enriched.
“Great business ideas don’t happen without great people.” ~ Jim Collins
Leadership sets the stage for either success or failure, the choice is yours.
You can’t control luck, but you can capitalize on it by preparing for it when it comes knocking on your door.
We can neither predict nor govern the future because uncertainty is chronic, instability is permanent, and disruption is inevitable.
Great leaders help people see in themselves more possibilities than they’ve ever perceived on their own.
There is no better way to destroy a great culture than to retain people in key positions who fail to perform.
If you want to grow your people, you have to grow yourself first!
Culture doesn’t support strategy, culture is strategy.
Accomplishments in themselves bring little meaning or lasting satisfaction, but the pursuit of accomplishment with the right people on the Bus can produce amazing satisfaction.
We usually give our best performance when other people depend on us to come through.
Your mannerisms of speech, decision-making, and how you behave will rub off on your team far more effectively than any motivational speech.
If you want to be an effective leader, you’ve got to be a role model for the culture you want to create because people will inevitably emulate you.
Two people looking at the same facts will often arrive to entirely two different conclusions because they made different assumptions.
A bad decision is often better than no decision at all.
No matter how smart you think you are, it’s impossible to be right all the time, so accept the fact that a good number of your decisions will be suboptimal.
Doing nothing and postponing your decision can feel comfortable because it’s without immediate risk.
The psychological consequences of making mistakes can sometimes seem far worse than the actual consequences themselves.
Without disagreement, your team probably doesn’t fully understand the problem.
If the organization seems to have a unanimous worldview without any disagreement, know wholeheartedly that there’s something important missing.
The most innovative companies tend to push decisions as far down the organization as possible, which gives people the opportunity to move faster at all levels and use their creativity to solve problems.
If you tend to take all the credit for good decisions and blame others for mistakes, you’ll quickly lose the respect of your team.
Try your best to avoid making decisions unless you have disagreement to make sure that your ideas are challenged and validated.
Without disagreement, you might not fully understand the problem, And at the same time, without unified commitment, you’ll most likely fail to execute.
When you manage your time wisely, you’ll discover many unused pockets of productive time in your life, like writing book summaries on Medium.
If you find it difficult for you to focus, chances are that you’re struggling with being decisive.
In most companies, people only receive feedback when something goes wrong, which makes them dread their feedback session because they know there’s nothing good coming out of it.
When criticizing someone, your process of critiquing should be an educational experience that enables the development of the individual, instead of being a critic.
When feelings are suppressed, real communication cannot persist.
Great visionary leaders turn the vision of the company into a communal property of members of the company itself.
The quest of always wanting something more without meaning is unsatisfying because if there’s no point in what you do, you end-up losing sight of why you’re in business in the first place.
When you have purpose in the work that you do, you’ll never be at loss for meaningful work.
In order for a vision to be effective, it must fulfill two main criteria: it must be clear and well understood, then shared with all key players in the organization.
Great leadership is defined by what you do with what happens to you, especially when it’s unexpected.
When you have disciplined people, you don’t have to rely on hierarchy or bureaucracy to govern them.
When you have disciplined action, you don’t need excessive control to monitor progress.
“The only mistakes that you can learn from are the ones you survive” ~ Jim Collins
If you want to build a company that lasts for generations to come, you need to build a company that can adapt to inevitable changes along the way.
It’s much more effective to act quickly on a partially baked idea than to spend countless hours deliberating about all the reasons why it can’t work.
Innovation is about finding the relationship between unconnected ideas by fusing them together to solve a problem or enhance performance in a given market.
Innovation requires experimentations and mistakes, where you can’t have one without the other!
If you truly believe in something, just do it because it’s far easier to ask for forgiveness then to ask for permission.
The worst mistakes are those that are repeated over and over again.
What makes mistakes extremely valuable are the lessons learned from the mistakes and not the mistakes themselves.
How you deal with mistakes and failure greatly influences people’s creativity.
The problem isn’t that people are inherently uncreative, it’s that people are afraid to be creative.
The opposite side of the coin of success isn’t failure, it’s growth.