Content Library
What is culture and how to create a good one
Culture has a direct impact on your productivity and the productivity of everyone that works for you and with you, for better or worse. Many founders are not aware of the importance of culture and therefore let culture develop randomly and inconsistently, resulting in lost profits and higher chances of failure. Savvy founders craft a culture that focuses everyone’s efforts on delivering what the founder feels will be the business’ competitive advantage.
How To Prioritize Your Strategic Imperatives
In our blog post “Understanding How To Lead; From An Idea To A Fully Mature Enterprise” we described each of four stages of development that must be completed to create a self-sustaining enterprise. We described how the strategic imperative of each stage is to get to the next stage of maturity. A good specific strategy for a given type of business, with a specific leader, involves figuring out what is the smallest set of actions and resources required to progress to the next stage. As external developments can derail efforts, the best smallest set of actions and resources should have the characteristic that they have a high chance of getting the business to the next stage under challenging real world scenarios.
Understanding how you lead from an idea to a fully mature enterprise
The growth of an idea into a value-producing and self-sustaining enterprise occurs in four distinct stages. These stages manifest themselves because projects, processes, and cultures do not just materialize; they must be created in a certain order subject to highly constrained resources. If they are not, a stunted, unproductive, and culturally problematic enterprise will ensue—analogous to what would happen if you were to raise an infant, child, or adolescent without sensitivity for the needs of each particular stage of the young person's life.
How you create value
Value is created when some combination of materials, information, energy and actions are transformed into a new combination that someone is willing to trade assets with perceived higher total value to own, enjoy, or control. An ancient and simple example would be clay pots used by hunter-gatherers. They created value by gathering clay, and then followed instructions (information) to form the clay into different shapes and designs, which were then fired at high temperature (using energy in the form of heat) to transform the clay into an earthenware pot that the tribe would trade to another tribe that did not have pottery skills.
How the Entrepreneurial Journey Unfolds
Entrepreneuring is a journey and if you are thinking of being an entrepreneur you will benefit from understanding and anticipating what’s ahead. While everyone’s entrepreneurial journey is unique, all journeys share several fundamental characteristics. All journeys start when a person contemplates whether entrepreneurship could be good for them and all journeys end when that person no longer cares whether entrepreneuring could be good for them. In between think of the journey having 5 steps:
Enterprises are needy
Children are needy, and so are enterprises. Needs shift as the child or enterprise grows. If parents treat their teenager like an infant, trouble ensues. If an entrepreneur attempts to lead his growing enterprise the same way he did when the first prototype was built, trouble also ensues. A fledgling enterprise needs different things from its leader as it matures from an interesting idea into a value-producing, self-sustaining enterprise. Entrepreneurs are often insensitive to the trouble that comes from giving the wrong sort of attention and leadership to their enterprises.