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.

Co-founders split when working together becomes intolerable. We have already discussed how co-founders can flourish. Unfortunately, that often does not happen. On the overview page to Session 12 we mentioned the statistic that only 1 in 4 founding teams stay together for more than four years. We can also add that co-founders splitting in the first four years is the biggest cause of startup failure.

This blog leads through steps to create a powerful PLS. We assume you have already read and digested the previous blog titled “Entrepreneurial Self-Awareness.” Working through the steps outlined in that blog yielded a list of strengths and weaknesses specific to achieving your entrepreneurial ambitions. We need these results and analyses as input for this exercise.

Co-founders are a blessing and a curse for fairly obvious reasons. They are GREAT when they share the workload, are equally passionate about the vision of the business and its success, they think in a complimentary fashion, when the understand ‘you’, and when they have a complimentary skill set and personality and when that personality includes an empathetic open-mindedness. And when that co-founder is a friend that can ease the emotional stress associated with founding a business. And when that co-founder is a lover that can add some sexual energy to the business.

Hiring or contracting for other people to help you is expensive and risky, but it is essential for all but the simplest or smallest of enterprises. Many tedious tasks that would have kept you from more valuable tasks can now be delegated to an AI service. If you are not using AI at least as an assistant, then you ultimately will not be competitive. This blog is not about how to use AI as there is no shortcut to the need to experiment.

Most people can tell that they are in a relationship, but most people have a very difficult time describing the relationships they are in. Being able to spot and create shared objectives underpins the ability to knowingly form meaningful and powerful relationships; this ability is key to mastering the relationship building skillset.

A relationship is a connection between two people. The “thing” connecting people in a relationship is called a “shared objective.” A shared objective is anything that two different people aspire to have happen.

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.

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.

To explain how you weave together cooperative, competitive, and retreating shared objectives with individuals that play a big role in helping you make your dreams come true, I will use a real example. My success as an entrepreneur would not have been possible without a deep and productive relationship with my second-in-command.

If you want to be a successful entrepreneur, you will need to successfully create new relationships with strangers. This requires that you approach them in such a way that they clearly understand your proposed cooperative shared objective and their share of the potential payoff. There are many ways to do this and here we discuss some of the easiest to master.

A startup is always changing. It must change to grow, to respond to customers and stakeholders, and to develop strengths and flexibilities to endure challenging environments, conditions, and competitors. Enterprises also must change when the people who form the enterprise change. Successfully leading change is an essential skill of all entrepreneurial leaders (and a generally useful skill for all of us).

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:

The most basic and fundamental of all relationships is formed when two parties communicate. No powerful and productive relationships can form without communication. Communicating always has the shared objective of accurately transferring information and emotion between two people. Understanding the strategies that improve accurately transferring information and emotion is essential to the effectiveness of people working together.