Category Archives: Reflections

10 Traits of Successful Entrepreneurs

Back to Fundamentals, Entrepreneurship, Reflections

It started as a comment at the bottom of my 10 signs you're probably an entrepreneur post on this blog, a few days ago. What are the traits of successful entrepreneurs?

I was quoting a Twitter friend, Andrew Patricio. I hope you saw that list. I identified easily. But I can't help thinking about that comment left by Robert Hacker:

Next post should be a list of the characteristics of successful entrepreneurs 🙂 If you do not write it I will.

That's quite a challenge. What, besides the obvious, do successful entrepreneurs have in common? I know I'm not sure. But at least I can get the idea started. Maybe you can help. What am I missing?

  1. There's a lot of talk about P-words: passion, perseverance, and persistence. I mistrust all three. A lot of unsuccessful entrepreneurs have them just as much. You have to have some variation on these traits, but you can have all three and still fail. You and I both know people who never made it and never stopped trying. My favorite P-word in entrepreneurship is planning, but that's just me. Stubbornness is good too, even without starting with P.
  2. I like empathy, as in understanding how other people think and feel about things. Empathy leads to understanding what the people you sell to want, what they need, how they think, and how to best reach them. It's hard to imagine somebody building a company without being able to put themselves in the buyer's state of mind.
  3. A sense of fairness. For dealing with vendors, customers, and employees.
  4. Transferable values. This is closely related to the sense of fairness. I just don't see people building businesses without believing in what they're doing. 
  5. Willingness to work hard, shoulder to shoulder with other people. Cliche, but true: the harder I work, the luckier I get.
  6. Knowing what they don't know. To me that's much more important than what you do know.
  7. Listening carefully. Shutting up.
  8. Vision for what they can build. Imagining a happy future. Dreaming.
  9. Making mistakes. You have to deal with failure. Keep pitching.  
  10. Jumping viewpoints, like from short- to long-term in an instant, mixing those viewpoints together. That's like dribbling, keeping your eyes up while managing the ball at your feet.

So there's 10. Everybody likes lists of 10. Go ahead. Add some more. Make my day. 

Work on Stuff That Matters

Back to Fundamentals, Entrepreneurship, Reflections

The title caught my eye: Work on Stuff that Matters. By Tim O'Reilly, of O'Reilly Media.

Yes, I agree. I get it that we're in a downturn now, tough times for a lot of businesses, we're losing jobs, businesses are going under; but in the meantime you stay focused on value, do a good job, and get through it. The good businesses will survive and prosper, and the new businesses that fill wants and needs, and give value, will grow.

That post is really good, go read it. But if you insist, here's a short summary.

1. Work on something that matters more than money. "Think about what you really value … Don't be afraid to think big." He continues:

Don't be afraid to fail. There's a wonderful poem by Rainer Maria Rilke that talks about the biblical story of Jacob wrestling with an angel, being defeated, but coming away stronger from the fight. It ends with an exhortation that goes something like this: "What we fight with is so small, and when we win, it makes us small. What we want is to be defeated, decisively, by successively greater things."

One test of a bubble is how many entrepreneurs are focused on their upcoming payday rather than on the big things they hope to accomplish. Me-too products are almost always payday-focused; the entrepreneurs who first made the market often had much less expectation of easy success, and were instead wrestling, like Jacob with the angel, with a hard problem that they thought they could solve, or at the very least make a dent on.

2. Create more value than you capture. He refers to Jean Valjean in Les Miserables, makes his point very well. In one part he says:

Look around you: How many people do you employ in fulfilling jobs? How many customers use your products to make their own living? How many competitors have you enabled? How many people have you touched that gave you nothing back?

Focusing on big goals, rather than on making money, and on creating more value than you capture are closely related principles. The first one is a test that applies to those starting something new; the second is the harder test that you must pass in order to create something enduring.

3.Take the long view.

And, at the end, a very good conclusion:

That's why a time like this, when the bubble is bursting, is a great time to see how important it is to think about the big picture, and what matters not just to us, but to building a sustainable economy in a sustainable world.

Dreamers and Doers Both, Not One or the Other

Reflections, True Stories

I posted yesterday about a New York Times story titled Dreamers and Doers, about Babson College. I had to hold myself back, because this subject is so tangential to that. It's about the title, which has very little to do with the content of the story. But I don't like the "dreams and doers" talk. It reminds me of some old discussions, old times, and old objections to the idea that one is a dreamer or a doer, but not both.

Hey world, don't you want to be both? Do you have to choose? Are you born as one or the other?

Can you get anything done without dreaming in between? What would the motivation be?

My wife and I were married very young — both of us were 22 — and we were pretty much constantly broke until Palo Alto Software finally made it, just a few years ago, when we were both in our 50s.  Raising five kids, building a business, and constantly broke, we used to dream together, out loud, walking and talking, fairly often. We'd dream about having the down payment to buy a house, or starting a company, or going back to school, or moving, and sometimes all of the above.

The dreaming was motivating. It kept us going.

I read, somewhere, that one common trait of entrepreneurs was dreaming about the rewards they'd get later, if they succeeded. In our case, I think we dreamt not of fabulous wealth but of financial survival. I can't speak for my wife on this one, but to me, money has always been a binary thing: enough, or not enough. We dreamt of enough. Aiming too low, I suppose, but it worked.

And the doing was constant. The dreaming didn't get in the way of it. On the contrary, it spurred and inspired us to keep going with the doing.  

A Planner’s 3 Rules on Resolutions

Baby Boomer, Reflections

In 30-some years of professional business planning, I've developed a few theories on what works, and what doesn't, when it comes to trying to get something done. Usually I'm talking about business planning, and how to make plans become actions, how to make planning a long-term management improvement, rather than some pieces of paper that don't mean very much stuffed in a drawer somewhere. So today, applying some of my planning fundamentals to New Year's Resolutions, I've developed this list of three points that I hope can help us all — certainly me included — with those resolutions.

1. Choose Your Target Well

Obvious? Good. It should be. Change what you do, not who you are. Change habits, not attributes. Change behavior.

Make sure you're focusing on things you can control. You and only you. In budgeting we talk about discretionary vs. non-discretionary spending. That works for life too; discretionary behavior, things you can control. You know the difference.

2. Make it Concrete, Specific, and Measurable

Avoid generalities. For example, not just "lose weight," but rather stop drinking soft drinks between meals, or stop eating after 8 p.m., or stop having the donut with the morning coffee. Not just "more exercise," but what days, how much, what routines, how long.

Try this test: Ask yourself how you'll know, two weeks, a month, three months from now, if you kept your resolution.

Break your habits or behaviors down into specifics. Break them into pieces you can follow. Are you too quick to get angry with your kids? Break that down into something you can control, like maybe two full minutes of quiet time per day with each kid. Yes or no, did you have that time together. One time per day your kid gets a moment to talk to you, without rushing. Break it down into something you can track. (I'm father of five, I know the value of setting a moment aside from the chaos, and how hard it is to do sometimes.)

3. Set Specific Review Tactics

Wow, this sounds really nerdy and list-making annoying, doesn't it? Scares me. Maybe that's why I'm not so good at resolution keeping (do what I say, not what I do). But I said I'm taking this from my business planning practice, and in business planning if you don't schedule your plan review in advance you've diminished your chances of implementation by half or more. So in New Year's Resolutions, set up your reviews.

That would mean, hmmm, maybe you're going to promise to record success, or failures, to do your specific measurable actions, such as sending an email to yourself every day you run that mile or skip the muffin, or maybe an email every day you don't run the mile or don't skip the muffin.

That would mean maybe you remind yourself to look at the results the third Thursday of every month, or every Saturday morning; did you stop the after-dinner snack, do you weigh less. Or did you stop and get that special daily minute or two with your kid?

A Final Note

It's slightly embarrassing: I don't claim any real expertise with the kind of life-changing stuff that New Year's Resolutions ought to be made of. Giving advice in this realm is scary and probably presumptuous, so I have to apologize. But I've watched this kind of thing for years in business planning, and I think these three rules might help.

Now I'm going to try to practice what I preach. 

(Note: I am reposting this here for my readers; I posted it on Small Business Trends about an hour earlier. Tim.)

Are Bizschools Training the Wrong People the Wrong Ways?

Business Education, Reflections

What if we measured the effectiveness of education — any education — by the impact on human lives? What if we said an MBA degree isn't about earning power and recruiting, but thinking power and effectiveness and getting things done; by how many businesses we've started, or grown; by how many new jobs we've created; by how many houses our employees have purchased to live in with loved ones?

What if we measured education by how well we treated our fellow humans in the workplace, on the street, and in the home? Shouldn't that be a relevant scale?

Consider this, a great quote, in a business school context:

"It was our view that you need to think critically about what you are doing every 100 years or so, whether you need to or not."

That's Harvard Business School Dean Jay Light, as quoted — with tongue obviously in cheek — in Harvard Business School Discussed the Future of the MBA, on the HBS site. Yes, he meant to be ironic, and yes, the Harvard Business School is 100 years old this year. And, (third yes in a row), yes, a lot of business school leaders are looking critically at MBA programs. With depressing results.

For their research project, Datar and Garvin interviewed 30 deans and associate deans and roughly 100 students in large and small groups. They wrote case studies on MBA programs at Chicago, INSEAD, Stanford, Yale, and HBS, plus a case on the Center for Creative Leadership (all are available from Harvard Business Publishing); collected data on aggregate trends in MBA enrollments and program designs; and compiled a detailed curriculum analysis of eleven business school programs. To complete the picture, they also interviewed leading academic critics and 28 executives and recruiters. The findings presented a mixed diagnosis of the health of MBA programs, but on balance were, in the words of one HBS faculty member, "depressing."

Depressing, despite the fact that business schools worldwide are producing half a million MBAs every year, 150,000 of them in the United States.

And here's another interesting quote from that same post:

Henry Mintzberg of McGill University in Montreal devoted a book to his contention that "conventional MBA programs train the wrong people in the wrong ways with the wrong consequences."

It gets worse as you read on, even more depressing, except for the fact that these are a lot of the best schools putting their heads together and trying to figure this out. And that's not depressing, because critical thinking seems like a good step towards improving things. How do you teach business? And how, for that matter, do you measure the value of having been taught?

Here's one thing I know (or at least I'm sure of) about this subject: you don't measure the value of education by income. And you don't measure it by utility to employers.

And I'm still glad, about 30 years later, for my two years in business school. I liked the life we led as a family on campus, I liked the profs, I liked the classes, and those two years worked for me to pass me through the tunnel from journalism to building my own business. I wouldn't have missed it.

And on the other hand, I don't have much evidence that it's good for you, or the next person, or everybody.  It worked for me.

Don’t Tempt Fate. Be Thankful.

Reflections

Many years ago I sat with my older brother Frank in a pleasant sunny end zone and watched the Stanford football team get ahead of Washington State 25-14 at halftime. We rooted for Stanford.

I made fun of the game and it's score, saying that it was all over, we could go home now, the end result was completely obvious. Frank got angry. "Don't tempt fate!" I was joking, but he was serious about it, and to him it wasn't funny.

And, lo and behold, as if it were bad fiction, Washington State won that game 49-42. To this day, when it comes up (and it just did, in email) Frank insists that Stanford's surprising loss was my fault, because I had tempted fate.

Today, Thanksgiving holiday in the U.S., don't tempt fate. Be thankful. I am. I won't bore you with all the reasons here, but please think of some for yourself. It could always be worse.

Don't tempt fate.

Be Your Own Boss: In Your Nightmares

Reflections

One of the things that has bugged me most, over 30 years of involvement with entrepreneurship, and my own consulting business, and later on my own company, is the annoying phrase "be your own boss." You can’t really be successful in your own business if your goal is to "be your own boss." Yes, I know, there are exceptions, but the rule is, your customer (or client) is your boss.

This got through my spam catcher:

Are you tired of working in a 9 to 5 job you hate? Do you wish you could work from home and enjoy the freedom of being your own boss?

Now is your chance to quit the rat race and stop living paycheck to paycheck with this guaranteed work from home program. There’s no experience necessary and best of all, anyone can learn the ins and outs of becoming a quality and effective rebate processor.

Don’t spend another day enduring the drudgery of your boring office job! Anyone with a computer can start working from home tomorrow, so start down the path to a happier, more independent future today.

Now really! Do they think it isn’t obvious what’s involved in processing rebates? Routine, routine, routine. Paid by the piece, of course, which means a very, very low hourly rate. And no chance for advancement, obviously, because what’s the career path in rebate processing? More rebate processing, I suppose.

What’s most annoying is that my underlying assumption is that if these things are in email, then somebody is believing them. And that’s sad. And it also perpetuates the spam, too.

Time Is not Money. Time is Life

Reflections

What’s the scarcest resource? Time.

I’ve had a lot of business training, and the privilege of listening to some great speakers, but that simple thought is something my wife taught me, in the early years of our marriage, when we had young kids.

I was one of those who started working a lot to pick up more money. I had a full-time job as a business writer, and a second just-as-good income from freelance writing. But it was in Mexico, the peso was overvalued, we had three kids in four years, and journalism doesn’t pay well; so we were always broke.

But — and this is important — early on, when I started to get second thoughts, wasn’t sure if I could go camping on the weekend because I had too much work, she wouldn’t let it happen — well okay, sometimes it was obvious, I had to do the extra work, so she wasn’t 100% consistent — but most of the time, she’d remind me:

"Tim, we won’t get these times back. These kids won’t always be little. It won’t be long before they won’t even want to go with us."

And also, at least within reason, she was good about not letting chronic lack of money interfere with family times, like vacations. While broke, we’d go backpacking instead of Disneyland, or rent a cheap houseboat for three nights instead of seven, but we’d have our time relatively well spent.

There again, we’d stretch the money farther than we thought possible, but Vange would remind me, at the key moments, "we don’t get these times back."

Nothing is always true. I worked on weekends off and on for years, and still do. And she made that easy for me when it clearly had to be done. But she also booked vacations, even relatively cheap ones like the backpacking, well in advance so I couldn’t blow them off for work.

And, as I hope you can tell, I’m grateful.

Does this reflection seem out of place for a mostly-business blog? Maybe, but actually, as I think of it, no, it isn’t. Because the biggest mistake most of us make in business is forgetting that business is not our first priority.

I forget where I first heard the cliche: "Nobody on their death bed wishes they spent more time in the office."

Why this topic now? Thankfully, not a health problem, or at least none that I know of. Maybe it’s that our youngest is off to her last year in college tomorrow, making this her last true summer vacation. But mostly, I think,  because I just finished reading Death of the Clock: Reclaiming Your Time by Jonathan Mead on Zen Habits:

We always find more things to do, more projects to work on, more ways to improve and optimize. But when we base our happiness on achievement, we’ve joined the cult of productivity. Being productive is no longer a means to an end. It’s the end entirely. And it’s a sickness.

Here are some signs you’ve contracted the productivititis:

  1. Inability to sit still for prolonged periods of time while playing games or spending time with friends.
  2. Accidentally leaving your planner at home causes you to break into a cold sweat.
  3. Lack of a highly-detailed action plan induces blurred vision, lack of ability to focus, and severe anxiety.
  4. You feel that saving time is a serious accomplishment.
  5. Clearing your inbox in 40 seconds less than yesterday is cause for a monumental celebration.
  6. Painting, laying out on the beach, and other non time-based activities are considered a horrendous sin against productivity.

Part of the reason for this obsession with productivity is we think time is money. But time is not money. Time is life."

Wow. That’s beautifully put? Something everybody in business should think about now and then … or maybe more often than just now and then.

And, although I’m going to stop here, Jonathan doesn’t. He goes on to list eight suggestions: keep in balance, stay in perspective, say no … but do yourself a favor, and read it as he wrote it, not just my summary here.

What? You don’t have time for that?

Tune In, Turn on, Do Your Business

Business Stories, Entrepreneurship, Reflections

This is so cool: writing in Escape From Cubicle Nation yesterday, Pamela Slim suggests that social good is a natural extension of entrepreneurship. This reminds me, happily, of the dreams of the late 1960s, when a lot of us — mostly young people, a lot of college students, a lot of so-called hippies — thought we could end a war and change business and government in a single generation.

We were wrong, of course. We couldn’t.

The 60s ended, we grew up, sold out, and (some of us, at least) got into business. The war ended on its own power, Nixon resigned, we had children. And MBA degrees. And cool cars. 

"Hippy" became a Halloween costume, like cowboy and astronaut.  And then, as if it had happened in a flash, we had grandchildren.

But no, wait. Maybe we just had to wait about 40 years. Maybe there was something to all that, after all. One of the catch phrases back then was "drop out, tune in, turn on." That, unfortunately, was mostly about LSD and Timothy Leary and all that, but wouldn’t it be fun to think that it applies now to what Pam’s talking about.

Specifically, she cites three reasons for her thesis:

  • Suppressed emotions, dangerous to expose in corporate life, rise to the surface and you begin to feel more deeply
  • Having launched a successful venture, you realize that it is possible to take something from concept to reality
  • You look at world challenges through an entrepreneurial lens:  as a problem to be solved, not as something overwhelming and unchangeable

Wouldn’t it be nice if somehow, there was a long-term thread that really matters in all this, something to link green business to underlying human values and maybe a future in which doing good is in fact long-term good business as well. It’s a good thought, anyhow.

Here’s more on this from Pam:

Although I don’t talk about this much, I admit that all my "freeing corporate prisoners" work is actually a secret plot to unleash smart people on world problems.  In college, I majored in International Service and Development, with an emphasis on Non formal Adult Education in Latin America (say that three times fast!).  The basic theory underpinning my work, which I studied in-country in Mexico, Colombia and Brazil, is that when people have access to education and supportive networks, they take care of their own problems.

While some people may think working with highly educated corporate employees with existential angst is the height of elitism, I actually see it as the first step to creating deep, widespread social change.

I recognize that some times I go off too far on the old hippy theme, but really, stereotypes aside, isn’t it clear that wrapping values into business works? At least for most of us? That there is something embedded in humanity that makes us happier and healthier and better off when we’re doing something that we believe has value?

I think we need to talk about this more, in business oriented blogs, to counteract the "but it’s business" idea that business is somehow different from life. We say "all’s fair in love and war," perhaps — although I’d say actually not in either one — meaning that they are somehow outside of the normal sense of fairness and value; but we don’t say all’s fair in business.

Escape from Cubicle Nation: Social good: a natural extension of entrepreneurship?

Is Trendy and Fashionable Bad?

Reflections

Green MBAs, alternative energy, organic food, healthy eating, regular exercise … all trendy and fashionable; is that bad?

We drove in a quiet Prius through a beautiful northern California landscape for several hours, talking. I complained about McCain advertising talking about Obama instead of McCain. Ralph Ishmael  (per the comment below) said the accusation was legitimate: Obama is trendy and fashionable and popular, which is bad, he said, because it becomes a bandwagon. And bandwagons get in the way of discussion, analysis, and debate.

I asked: "so is trendy bad, per se? Do we never have the phenomenon of good healthy trends, like, say — I thought these examples would be obvious — a trend towards green business and healthy eating?"

Yes, he answered, those are all bad; to the extent that they are trendy, and trendy drowns debate.

But do we want debate about environmental or social or health consciousness? Aren’t those trends just plain good for all, good for the earth, good for business, good for humans? I didn’t want to just accept the idea that trendy drowns debate, but still, for the sake of argument, I thought these truths would be self evident.

But Ralph says global warming isn’t yet accepted as scientific, and needed debate and discussions are stifled now. Scientists with counter evidence are shouted down.

I was surprised. I thought educated people have accepted that environmental worries, particularly the phenomena related to what we call (for lack of a better name) global warming. Haven’t they? The fact that green and organic and healthy are marketable now, people who can afford to worry are worried, that seems all good to me.

I think "trendy" and "fashionable" are characteristics that are neither good nor bad, but neutral. Trends can be pushing bad things too, like (in my opinion) the trend towards cosmetic surgery today, or the trend towards big SUVs a few years ago. But when trends reinforce behavior that is good for people, earth, humanity, etc., then that’s good. No?