The Art of the Start/Kawasaki 69-70

70 80% (effort) should go into the executive summary. These are most important paragraphs of your organization’s existence.

TIPS FOR EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

1) Do not exceed 20 pages in length
2) Select one person to write the business plan
3) Bind the plan with a staple
4) Simplify your financial projections to two pages.
5) Include the key metrics, such as the number of customer, locations, and resellers
6) Included the assumptions that drive your financial projections

Heidi Roizen (Mobius Venture Capital) I like to see detailed monthly numbers.
Mike Moritz (Sequoia Capital) We always focus on the first eighteen months to two years on the assumptions.
Steve Jurvetson (Draper, Fisher, Jurvetson) Ultimately, we fund entrepreneurs who want to change the world.

Survival is Not Enough/Godin 153-155

154 I’m suggesting that you spend two or three times as much on your HR staff as you do now, that you spend two or three times as much on identifying and hiring exactly the right people.

…But if your goal is to build a runaway group of zoomers, how could anything be more important? Great employees are the last great bargain. Grab them while you can

The Innovator’s Dilemma explains how many companies fall victim to technology changes that they didn’t see coming (or couldn't take advantage of once they did see them). The overlooked part of Christensen’s theory is that it’s not the knowledge the wizard has that’s missing from the companies. It’s the willingness to act on it.

155 If the company is always ready to try something new, if it’s easy to propagate successful change throughout the company, the wizard will actually accomplish something.

Intellectual Capital/Stewart 50-55

51 But in the age of intellectual capital, the most valuable parts of those jobs have come the most essentially human tasks: sensing, judging, creating, building relationships.

55 The hard assets of a knowledge company contribute far less to the value of its ultimate product (or service) than the intangible assets--the talents of its people, the efficacy of its management systems, the character of its relationships to its customers--that together are its intellectual capital.

...tells us that someone who invests in a company is buying a set of talents, capabilities, skills, and ideas--intellectual capital, not physical capital.

GOOD TO GREAT/COLLINS 10-12

12 FLYWHEEL OF GTG

LEVEL 5 LEADERSHIP..Self-effacing, quiet, reserved, even shy--these leaders are a paradoxical blend of personal humility and professional will. They are more like Lincoln and Socrates than Patton or Caesar.

FIRST WHO...THEN WHAT ...they first got the right people on the bus, the wrong people office the bus, and the right people in the right seats--and then they figured out where to drive it. The old adage "People are your most important asset" turns out to be wrong. People are not your most important asset. The right people are.

CONFRONT THE BRUTAL FACTS (YET NEVER LOSE FAITH) You must maintain unwavering faith that you can and will prevail in the end, regardless of the difficulties, AND at the same time have the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.

THE HEDGEHOG CONCEPT (SIMPLICITY WITHIN THE THREE CIRCLES) And if you cannot be the best in the world at your core business, then your core business absolutely cannot form the basis of a great company.

A CULTURE OF DISCIPLINE. All companies have a culture, some companies have discipline, but few companies have a culture of discipline. When you have disciplined people, you don't need hierarchy. When you have disciplined thought, you don't need bureaucracy. When you have disciplined action, you don't need excessive controls. When you combine a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship, you get the magical alchemy of great performance.

TECHNOLOGY ACCELERATORS gtg...They never use technology as the primary means of igniting a transformation. Yet, paradoxically, they are pioneers in the application of carefully selected technologies. We learned that technology by itself is never a primary, root cause of either greatness or decline.

The Art of the Start/Kawasaki 68-69

69 A pitch is easier fix than a business plan because it contains less text.

You won’t get feedback on the business plan. You will, however, get immediate reactions to your pitch.

FOCUS ON THE EXECUTIVE SUMMARY.
Title Slide
Problem
Solution
Business Model
Underlying magic
Marketing and sales
Competition
Management team
Financial projections and key metrics
Current status, accomplishments to date, timeline, and use of funds.

Survival is Not Enough/Godin 148-153

152 It’s harder to be a serf in a world that discovers new strategies.

Perfect is the enemy of good

But when a successful company moves from one field into another, it forgets about doing things slowly.

153…your future is in your employees

The usual HR strategy comes straight from the factory view of the world. If employees are nothing but cogs, then hiring the first person (or the cheapest person) who can do the job is the best way to go.

Great employees are the last great bargain.

Intellectual Capital/Stewart 46-50

47 The rise of the knowledge worker fundamentally alters the nature of work and the agenda of management. Managers are custodians; they protect and care for the assets of a corporation, when the assets are intellectual, the manager’s job changes.

49 When work is about knowledge, the professional model of organizational design inevitably begins to supersede the bureaucratic.

The trend away from standardized mass production toward specialized knowledge work makes command-and-control management less necessary—a good thing, too, because it’s also less feasible.

50…but the language of management is increasingly nonfinancial.

GOOD TO GREAT/COLLINS 5-10

10. In our study...

• Larger-than-life, celebrity leaders who ride in from the outside are negatively correlated with taking a company from good to great. Ten of eleven good-to-great CEO's came from inside the company, whereas the comparison companies tried outside CEO's six times more often.
  
• We found no systematic pattern linking specific forms of executive compensation to the process of going from good to great. The idea that the structure of executive compensation is a key driver in corporate performance is simply not supported by the data.
  
• Strategy per se did not separate the good-to-great companies from the comparison companies. Both sets of companies had well-defined strategies, and there is no evidence that the good-to-great companies spent more time on long-range strategic planning than the comparison companies.
  
• The good-to-great companies did not focus principally on what to do to become great; they focused equally on what not to do and what to stop doing.
  
• Technology and technology-driven change has virtually nothing to do with igniting a transformation from good to great. Technology can accelerate a transformation, but technology cannot cause a transformation.
  
• Mergers and acquisitions play virtually no role in igniting a transformation from good to great; two big mediocrities joined together never make one great company.
  
• The good-to-great companies paid scant attention to managing change, motivating people, or creating alignment, motivation, and change largely melt away.
  
• The good-to-great companies had no name, tag line, launch event, or program to signify their transformations. Indeed, some reported being unaware to signify their transformations. Indeed, some reported being unaware of the magnitude of the transformation at the time; only later, in retrospect, did it become clear. Yes, they produced a truly revolutionary leap in results, but not by a revolutionary process.
  
• The gtg (good-to-great) companies were not, by and large, in great industries, and some were in terrible industries. In no case do we have a company that just happened to be sitting on the nose cone of a rocket when it took off. Greatness is not a function of circumstance. Greatness, it turns out, is largely a matter of conscious choice.

Survival is Not Enough/Godin 143-148

145 The QVC customer, one of the company’s biggest assets, also slows their ability to change.

Direct marketing is measured, action advertising, delivered straight to the person the marketer has targeted to take that action.

146 Every single ad run on the Internet…could/should be a direct marketing ad.

147 For all the people in your company who are farmers, you need a system just like this—fast feedback loops that inform employee (and their bosses and peers) how they’re doing.

148 Direct marketing, after all, accounts for only half of all advertising.

The biggest difference between a hunter and a farmer is that the hunter’s winning strategy has far more freedom built in.

The best examples of hunters in the business world are sales people.

Because salespeople often know within a few minutes of making a pitch whether they’re succeeded, they’re able to test more often.

Intellectual Capital/Stewart 43- 46

44 They aren’t secretaries anymore. Rather than re-adding spreadsheets, they’re helping to analyze them; rather that retyping letters, they are doing research; rather than setting up meetings, they are arranging conferences. They’ve drained the typing pool and put in a gym.

Markets are pitiless. They reward whatever creates value and ignore or punish whatever does not.

If knowledge is the greatest source of economic value, one would expect to see labor markets reward people who work with their brains and slap around those who do not.

46 …educated people command a greater pay premium than used to.

It is significant that college-educated worker’s wage premium has grown despite the fact that supply has increased, too, as the percentage of the workforce that attended college rises.

GOOD TO GREAT/COLLINS 1-5

1. Good is the enemy of great.

Few people attain great lives, in large part because it is just so easy to settle for a good life. The vast majority of companies never become, great precisely because the vast majority become quite good--and that is their main problem.

5. Our five-year quest yielded many insights, a number of them surprising and quite contrary to conventional wisdom, but one giant conclusion stands above the others: We believe that almost any organization can substantially improve its stature and performance, perhaps even become great, it it conscientiously applies the framework of ideas we've uncovered.

Survival is Not Enough/Godin 140-143

141 The problem with serfs is that they will inevitable slow down your business. You will always have undersupply or oversupply, and it will be your problem, not someone else’s.

The big successes will go to those who can evolve faster and leverage more valuable assets.

142 Endless improvements and constant tweaking made farming efficient.

Farmers have understood for thousands of years that focusing on yield is the most important activity.

143 If your boss is more likely to say,’ we’ll work it out’ than ‘you’re fired,’ you’re going to be more likely to try new things.

Getting it wrong is just as important as getting it right, though, as it showed a willingness (even passion) for testing.

Intellectual Capital/Stewart 36-43

37 Knowledge work—the work of planning, supervising, scheduling, and managing—has become part of the job description of the hourly workers.

38 Information is, probably, the most important raw material you need to do your job.

41 An ever-growing percentage of people are “knowledge workers.” Information and knowledge are both the raw material of their labor and its product.

Knowledge-intensive companies—those that have 40 percent or more knowledge workers—account for 28 percent of total U.S. employment, but in the last half decade they produced fully 43 percent of new employment growth.

It’s not only that more people do knowledge work; also increasing is the knowledge content of all work.

Never Eat Alone/Ferrazzi 294-end

295 Happiness, he told us, had nothing to do with how much money we made or how we made it.

“to see things as they really are”

296 If you commit yourself to finding your passion, that blue flame, it’s interesting how that commitment is rewarded with answers.

Relationships.

297 What is your passion? What truly give you pleasure? How can you make a difference?
There’s nothing wrong with wanting to be the best in the world, as long as you remember that doing so also means wanting to be the best for the world.

298 Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.