The Art of the Start/Kawasaki 114-120

119 The Art of Raising Capital

Investors may be venture capitalists, management, foundations, government entities, or any of the three F:s friends, fools, and family.

Are you building something meaningful, long-lasting, and valuable to society?

120 If you want to get an investment, show that you will build a business.

Do it because you want to make the world a better place.

…entrepreneurs are all about—doing what people have told them is impossible.

Survival is Not Enough/Godin 190-194

192 Hotwash is one example of a feedback loop that forces the organization to distinguish between feedback and criticism and ensures that the loops don’t break.

194 One of the key traps of hotwash is the development of a mutual admiration society.

Hotwash sessions work best when the feedback is about the performance, not the performer. They work even better when the feedback is substantial and measured, not vague opinion. And they work best of all when someone is keeping track of who’s using the feedback to get better and who’s just enjoying the opportunity to be critical of someone else.

The Art of the Start/Kawasaki 106-114

113 When hiring define an initial review period and define performance objectives.

For example…objectives for a salesperson might included:
1) completion of product training
2) completion of sales training
3) participation in five sales calls.

Establish an understanding that after 90 days, there will be a joint review in which both sides discuss what’s going right, what’s going wrong, and how to improve performance.

114 Recruiting never stops.

GOOD TO GREAT/COLLINS 53-57

54 Six of the eleven gtg companies recorded zero layoffs from ten years before the breakthrough date all the way through 1998, and four others reported only one or two layoffs.

Endless restructuring and mindless hacking were never part of the gtg model.

3 DISCIPLINES FOR BEING RIGOROUS RATHER THAN RUTHLESS.

Practical Discipline #1 When in doubt, don't hire--keep looking. NO company can grow revenues consistently faster than its ability to get enough of the right people to implement that growth and still become a great company.

Those who build great companies understand that the ultimate throttle on growth for any great company is not markets, or technology, or competition, or products. It is one thing above all others: the ability to get and keep enough of the right people.

Practical Discipline #2 When you know you need to make a people change, act.

57 The gtg companies showed the following bipolar pattern at the top management level: People either stayed on the bus for a long time or got off the bus in a hurry. In other words, the gtg companies did not churn more, they churned better.

58 It might take time to know for certain if someone is simply in the wrong seat or whether he needs to get off the bus altogether. Nonetheless, when the gtg leaders knew they had to make a people change, they would act.

Practical Discipline #3: Put your best people on your biggest opportunities, and your biggest problems.

The Art of the Start/Kawasaki 104-106

106 Recruiting:

Your vision;
Your Team
Your Board of Directors, Advisors, and Investors
Resume-Building Potential...If you can get a few good years out of great people and help them build their resumes, do it.

Once you decide on a person, don’t hold anything back and use all your tools to hire him.

Survival is Not Enough/Godin 186-190

187 Why bother spending time to understand data if you’re not going to do anything with the information once you find it?

An evolving organization doesn’t want to put all its eggs in one basket, because it’s been demonstrated time and time again that organizations don’t know how to pick the right basket.

190 Cheap projects mean that you get more chances to find the right project. The only people who don’t benefit are companies obsessed with finding the right project before they launch anything. In the long run, those companies will always be defeated by the quick and cheap.

Intellectual Capital/Stewart 88-89

89 Human capital is easily dissipated. It needs to be massed and concentrated. That means that organizational intelligence, like any asset, must be cultivated in the context of action.

Any task, process, or business relies on three different kinds:

1) Commodity skills, abilities that are not specific to any particular business, are readily obtained, and are more or less equally valuable to any number of businesses.

2) Leveraged skills: knowledge that, while not specific to a particular company, is more valuable to it than to others. ...Leveraged skills tend to be industry-specific, but not company-specific.

3) Proprietary skills: the company-specific talents around which an organization builds a business.

GOOD TO GREAT/COLLINS 49-53

50 It's not how you compensate your executives, it's which executives you have to compensate in the first place.

Yes, compensation and incentives are important, but for very different reasons in gtg companies. The purpose of a compensation system should not be to get the right behaviors from the wrong people, but to get the right people on the bus in the first place, and to keep them there.

51 Nucor rejected the old adage the people are your most important asset. In a gtg transformation, people are not your most important asset. The right people are.

...dimensions like character, work ethic, basic intelligence, dedication to fulfilling commitments, and values are more ingrained.

52 To be rigorous means consistently applying exacting standards at all times and at all levels, especially in upper management. To be rigorous, not ruthless, means that the best people need not worry about their positions and can concentrate fully on their work.

53 The gtg companies rarely used head-count lopping as a tactic and almost never used it as a primary