GOOD TO GREAT/COLLINS 73-74

74 How do you manage in such a way as not to de-motivate people? And one of the single most de-motivating actions you can take is to hold out false hopes, soon to be swept away by events.

Yes, leadership is about vision. But leadership is equally about creating a climate where the truth is heard and the brutal facts confronted. There's a huge difference between the opportunity to "have your say" and the opportunity to be heard. The gtg leaders understood this distinction creating a culture wherein people had a tremendous opportunity to be heard and ultimately, for the truth to be heard.

Climate for the truth to be heard: 4 best practices.
1) Lead with questions, not answers.

The Art of the Start/Kawasaki 139-140

110 What can I expect from a good venture capitalist?...five hours a month of mindshare during which he opens doors for you with prospective customers and partners and interviews candidates for high-level positions at your company.

How can I identify the venture capital firms that have new funds with a maturity sufficiently far out so they align with my liquidity timeframe? …the timing of a fund is hardly ever a factor. …the firm is going to pick you and not vice versa, and there is no way to predict a liquidity timeframe.

What is the order of approaching the tiers of venture capitalists: tier one, then tier two, then three, or the other way around?...Pitch almost any firm you can get into.

What is the internal rate of return expected from tier-one, two, or three venture capitalist?
…investors look at cash-on-cash returns…you better be able to convince the investor that there is a realistic plan for returning 5x to 10x money in three to five years.

Does my business need to be fully functioning and profitable in order to attract investment capital? Your job is to find venture capitalists who make early bets on unproven companies.

Survival is Not Enough/Godin 227 - end

What does someone need to do to get fired?
Who are the three most powerful people standing between things that need to change and actual action by the company?
What if you fired those people?
What’s your company’s winning strategy?
Is each manager required to have her staff spend a portion of their time on creating the future.
Are you (personally) a serf, a farmer, a hunter or a wizard?
What about the people you work with everyday?
If you quit your job today, could you get a decent job as a farmer or a hunter?
If you could hire anyone in the world to help your company, who would it be?
What’s stopping you from hiring someone that good?
If an omniscient wizard walked into your offices and described the future and told you what to do to prepare for it, would your company be able to change in response to his vision.
How can your company dramatically lower the cost of launching a test?
Are there five area in your company that would benefit from fast feedback loops?
Are you building all your systems around testing and ignorance?
Are you hiding from the market?
Have you ever tried sushi?
If you could acquire another company’s mDNA, whose would you choose?
Why don’t you do that?
Are the economies of scale really as big as you think they are?
Is this project going to benefit from the learning it creates?
In what markets could your marketing efforts enter runaway?
How much time does senior management spend with unhappy customers?
What do you do with complaint letters?
What are you measuring?
Are you being selfish with your personal mDNA?
Have you institutionalized the process of sharing what you learn?
Are you focusing too much?
Are you the first choice among job seekers who have the mDNA you seek?
Are you the first choice among employers that have the winning strategy you seek?
What do you need to do to become the first choice?
Do you Zoom??

Meme—The basic building block or an idea or organization construct. The functional unit of idea transference. The recipe for crispy tofu is a meme. So is the idea that the world is round.

mDNA The sum of all the memes and assets (brands, factories, talented people, partners, patents, etc.) in an organization. Memes are not as digital as genes—sometimes a meme is tied up in the person or asset it inhabits and can’t easily transferred.

Intellectual Capital/Stewart 100-101

101 People can be rented, but not owned.

Valuable, hard-to-replace knowledge, the key to competitive advantage, is forged in communities of practice, but they and the human capital they create are not respecters of shareholder value.

Ceding "ownership" of human capital to a corporation, however, has to be voluntary. The short, but not simple way to do this: Create a sense of cross ownership between employee and company. "I believe that corporations should be membership communities because I believe corporations are not things, they are the people who run them.

To hold people to the corporation, there has to be some kind of continuity and some sense of belonging.

Knowledge workers...are likely to split their loyalty between their profession and peers on one hand, and their employing organization on the other. They stay committed to particular firms as long as those firms provide them with the needed resources for working on interesting projects. If this isn't forthcoming, knowledge workers will swiftly trade up to bigger sandboxes...To be effective, knowledge workers need to bond with their employing firms.

GOOD TO GREAT/COLLINS 72-73

73 Indeed, for those of you with a strong, charismatic personality, it is worthwhile to consider the idea that charisma can be as much a liability as an asset. Your strength of personality can sow the seeds of problems, when people filter the brutal facts from you. You can overcome the liabilities of having charisma, but it does require conscious attention.

Survival is Not Enough/Godin 227 - end

10 Tactics for companies that want to evolve quickly.

1) Invest in exploring to find the memes most likely to give you success.
2) Invest extra resources taking care of the people who carry the best set of memes.
3) Create lots of memes and kill the ones that fail.
4) Recognize that monogamy is bad.
5) Have a short gestation period and high periodicity—use fast feedback loops.
6) Invest as little as possible in the act of creating each new meme—keep your overhead tiny.
7) Don’t spend a lot or resources supporting memes that don’t make your company more fit, regardless of how historically cherished they are.
8) Swap memes with others.
9) Depend on recombination more that mutation.
10) Feed your young—invest in the memes that are worth spreading.

Intellectual Capital/Stewart 98-100

100 Fertilize the soil, but stay away from actual husbandry.

...evidently figured that sharing secrets was a fair price for progress. The standard corporate view is you're giving away the store, but the fact is, if others are cooperating and you decide not to, you fall behind.

GOOD TO GREAT/COLLINS 71-72

72 The moment a leader allows himself to become the primary reality people worry about, rather than reality being the primary reality, you have a recipe for mediocrity, or worse. This is one of the key reasons why less charismatic leaders often produce better long-term results than more charismatic counterparts.

The Art of the Start/Kawasaki 138-139

139 Tips for creating a good working relationship with your board.

Save trees…less paper is better than more paper

Provide useful metrics…in addition to accounting…nonfinancial metrics such as # of customers, # of installations, or number of visitors to your site, etc.

Send these reports two days before a board meeting. Board meetings are the time and place for discussing strategic issues—not for conveying the factual information contained in your reports.

You should spend little time in the meeting communicating the facts—and a lot of time figuring out how to improve them in the future.

Never Surprise a Board (Except with Good News) The worst time and place to announce bad news is at a board meeting. When you have bad news, meet privately with each member in advance and explain what happened.Get Feedback in Advance. The corollary of never surprising a board is to prepare board members well in advance to key decisions. If you know that you are going to discuss a key issue at an upcoming meeting, then talk to each member before the meeting. They might provide feedback that will change your perspective about the decision

Survival is Not Enough/Godin 226 - 227

227 The role of zooming in strategy is simple. It’s based on the idea that you don’t know what’s going to happen. Thus, a new, overriding strategy is now laid on top of all your other strategies. This strategy is simple: Build a company that’s so flexible and responsive, both in the long term and the short term, that we don’t care what happens. As long as there’s a lot of noise and disorganization and change, we’ll win.

In today’s world, betting on chaos seems to be the safest of bet of all.

IMPORTANT QUESTIONS

Why?
How do you respond to small, irrelevant changes?
How many people have to say “yes” to a significant change?
Do you have multiple projects in development that bet on conflicting sides of a possible outcome?
Are you building the five elements of an evolving organization?
1) Evolving organizations increase their zoomwidth daily.
2) They allow their employees to build quick and cheap prototypes.
3) They are aware of their winning strategy and they farm and hunt it regularly.
4) They instantly communicate learning across the organization so that winning memes are incorporated and bad ones are discarded.
5) They practice aggressive sexual selection strategies, firing bullies with the same zeal they hire new employees.

Are you investing in techniques that encourage fast memetic evolution?

Intellectual Capital/Stewart 97-98

98 Essentially, the formal structure of the first group prevented people from talking; the second group, like GE's Work-Out meetings, was full of places where people felt free to speak up.

Recognize them and their importance. (employees)
Give them the resources they need. (employees)

GOOD TO GREAT/COLLINS 69-71

71 There is nothing wrong with pursuing a vision for greatness. After all, the gtg companies also set out to create greatness. But, unlike the comparison companies, the gtg companies continually refined the path to greatness with the brutal facts of reality.

The Art of the Start/Kawasaki 137-138

138 The Art of Managing a Board.

..two kinds of expertise: company building and deep market knowledge.

Typical roles that need to be filled.

-The Customer…This person understands the needs of your customer.
-The Geek…This person provides a reality check with your development efforts.
-DAD/Mom…This person is the calming influence on the board.
-The tight-ass…This person pushes for totally legal and ethical practices.
-Jerry Maguire…This person has the Rolodex of industry contacts and is willing to let your organization use it.

Survival is Not Enough/Godin 225 - 226

226 As new tactics and techniques surface from the relentless use of testing and fast feedback loops, the system will change.

Intellectual Capital/Stewart 96 - 97

97 Communities of practice perform two main jobs of human capital formation: knowledge transfer and innovation.

Organizational learning depends on these often invisible groups, but they're virtually immune to management in a conventional sense--indeed, managing them can kill them.

GOOD TO GREAT/COLLINS 65 - 69

69 gtg companies did not have a perfect track record.

The gtg companies displayed two distinctive forms of disciplined thought. The first is that they infused the entire process with the brutal facts of reality. The second, is that they developed a simple, yet deeply insightful, frame of reference for all decisions