The Art of the Start/Kawasaki 136 - 137

137 The Art of Raising Angel Capital.

• Don’t underestimate them.
  
• Understand their motivations. Angels see two ways to pay back society: help young(er) people get a start, and help a product or service that makes meaning get to market.
  
• Enable them to live vicariously
  
• Make your story comprehensible to a spouse. The “investment committee” of an angel is his or her spouse.
  
• Be a nice person. Angels fall in love with entrepreneurs in a fatherly or motherly way.
  Sign up people they know or have heard of.

Survival is Not Enough/Godin 218 - 225

219 We make bets every day, and making many bets is smart.

225 …we run the business around the tests, not the other way around.

What if you spent that money building a system that made it easy to test the important things and then pass the data along?

So, instead of having just one or two small groups of people working on our online offers, we could open it up to hundreds of individuals or groups who want to help us succeed.

Intellectual Capital/Stewart 95 - 96

96 A group of professionals, informally bound to one another through exposure to a common class of problems, common pursuit of solutions, and thereby themselves embodying a store of knowledge.

GOOD TO GREAT/COLLINS 63 - 65

65 There is no worse mistake in public leadership than to hold out false hopes soon to be swept away. Winston Churchill

The Art of the Start/Kawasaki 135 - 136

136 …a good entrepreneur or writer never lets the truth get in the way of a good lesson.

Albert Einstein was on a train. He couldn’t find his ticket after searching through all his pockets and bags. The conductor approached him and said something to the effect of,

“Dr. Einstein, everyone know who you are. We know that Princeton can afford to buy you another train ticket.”

To which Einstein replied with something along the lines of, “I’m not worried about the money. I need to find the ticket to figure out where I’m going.”

Like Einstein, you should worry not about the money, but about where you are going. If you figure out where you’re going, the money will come.

Survival is Not Enough/Godin 216 - 218

218 4 ways to keep your company evolving.

1) keep your projects cheap
2) hold people accountable
3) you still lead
4) owners make better decisions.

GOOD TO GREAT/COLLINS 62-63

63 KEY POINTS

The gtg leaders began the transformation by first getting the right people on the bus (and the wrong people off the bus) and then figured out where to drive it.

The key point of this chapter is not just the idea of getting the right people on the team. The key point is that "who" questions come before "what" decisions--before vision, before strategy, before organization structure, before tactics. First who, then what--as a rigorous discipline, consistently applied.

The comparison companies frequently followed the "genius" with a thousand helpers" model--genius leaders who sets a vision and then enlists a crew of highly capable "helpers" to make the vision happen. This model fails when the genius departs.

The gtg leaders were rigorous, not ruthless, in people decisions. They did not rely on layoffs and restructuring as a primary strategy for improving performance. The comparison companies used layoffs to a much greater extent.

We uncovered three practical disciplines for being rigorous in people decisions. 1) When in doubt, don't hire--keep looking. (Corollary: A company should limit its growth based on its ability to attract enough of the right people.) 2) When you know you need to make a people change, act. (Corollary: First be sure you don't simply have someone in the wrong seat.) 3) Put your best people on your biggest opportunities, not your biggest problems. (Corollary: If you sell off your problems, don't sell off your best people.)

Gtg management teams consist of people who debate vigorously in search of the best answers, yet who unify behind decisions, regardless of parochial interests.

We found not systematic pattern linking executive compensation to the shift from good to great.

The purpose of compensation is not to "motivate" the right behaviors from the wrong people, but to get and keep the right people in the first place.

The old adage "People are your most important asset" is wrong. People are not your most important asset. The right people are.

Whether someone is the "right person" has more to do with character traits and innate capabilities than with specific knowledge, background, or skills.

The Art of the Start/Kawasaki 134 - 135

135
1) Venture capitalist believe that the rules are different for them.
2) They believe they are entitled to special treatment.
3) Venture capitalists aren’t necessarily different from you and me—they just happen to manage hundreds of millions of dollars.

Venture capitalists..
· They don’t know any more than you do about your sector. Still could you not think that they do when they are managing hundreds of millions of dollars?
· Getting a top-tier investor doesn’t guarantee that you’ll succeed. These firms make many bets, and they assume that most won’t pan out.
· The moment you take a dollar of outside money, you lose “control”. Control has nothing to do with the math of voting shares. When you take outside money, you’re obligated to all shareholders even if they own a minority position.
· Lower your expectations of what they can do for you, and you won’t be as disappointed. Outside investors can open doors for you to kick-start sales and partnerships. They can help you find future investors. They can prevent you from making mistakes if they’ve see other companies make similar mistakes. They can make the world take you slightly more seriously because “they invested in you.” But this is about it.

Survival is Not Enough/Godin 209-216

212 Instead of having the plant manager spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to save money on trash pickup, it makes more sense to spend that time changing the culture, so that hundreds of people start worrying about trash pickup.

216 There are rituals and winning strategies that no one has the guts to question, never mind replace. (Yahoo)

Intellectual Capital/Stewart 94-95

95 The relationship between individuals learning and an organization's human capital--not just its stock of knowledge but its capacity to innovate--involves groups even more than it does individuals. It makes sense that a corporate assets should be social in orgin.

The fundamental finding in IRL's work is the learning is a social activity. ...learning happens in gourps.

GOOD TO GREAT/COLLINS 61-62

62 Members of the gtg teams tended to become and remain friends for life.

...if we don't spend the vast majority of our time with people we love and respect, we cannot possibly have a great life.

The people we interviewed from the gtg companies clearly loved what they did, largely because they loved who they did it with

The Art of the Start/Kawasaki 132-134

134 The investor who might have said no is still watching what you do:

Did you try to establish contact after the pitch?
Did you answer questions that came up in the pitch?
Did you provide supplemental information that supports your case?
Have you surprised the investor by closing big customers or meeting milestones early?
Have other high-quality investors written you a check?

Persistence along these lines can pay off, and you can provide this sort of update weeks and months after your initial pitch…

…nobody funds a pest.

Survival is Not Enough/Godin 206-209

207 If you know something isn’t forever, it makes it easier to start something new.

208 There’s nothing easier to test and evolve than web pages.

209 Brainstorming…When you feel free to say something foolish, you’re far more likely to say something profound

Intellectual Capital/Stewart 93-94

94 ...that customers expect from the people they deal with at the bank: familiarity with its products line, a knowledge of accounting, etc.

...competency models were turned into "competency maps" that, in effect, display the skills people need to move along career paths.

The false correlation of learning with training or education is one of the most common and costly errors in corporate managment today.

...Armed with competency maps, employees are responsible for learning what they don't yet know or enhancing what they do--to perform thier current jobs not to prep for the job on the ladder's next rung. The idea is for employees to close the gaps between what they can do now and what customers expect them to be able to do.

...the company can measure achievement rather than participation--an output, not a cost; a skill attained, not a seat warmed.

...core competencies of the company and shows individuals how they can grown in the knowledge that hte bank needs.