BE 2.0 (Beyond Entrepreneurship 2.0)
by Jim Collins
In building his company and living his life, Hewlett adhered to a simple motto that he oft repeated: “Never stifle a generous impulse.
Bill believed that most people fail to achieve their audacious big dreams because they don’t fully commit at the crucial moment. To
If you spend your life keeping your options open, that’s exactly what you’ll do . . . spend your life keeping your options open.
“How do you know if you have a great relationship?” I asked. Bill thought about it for a moment, then answered, “If you were to ask each person in the relationship who benefits more from the relationship, both would answer, ‘I do.
Be very careful what you commit to,” Bill advised. “Because there’s no honorable way to fail a commitment freely made.”
Well, Jim, if you don’t love doing it, you won’t stay with it long enough to ever really get good at it.” Then he added, “Life is just too short not to enjoy what you’re doing. If we can’t make this fun, we should stop doing it!”
You need the right people far more than you need the right business idea, especially since any specific business idea is likely to fail anyway.
what’s that metric? The percentage of key seats on the bus filled with the right people for those seats.
What makes for a key seat? Any seat meeting any one of the following three conditions qualifies as key: The person in that seat has the power to make significant people decisions. Failure in the seat could expose the entire enterprise to significant risk or potential catastrophe. Success in the seat would have a significantly outsized impact on the company’s success.
One of the most destructive myths is that a founder-entrepreneur or small-business leader will almost inevitably hit his or her managerial limit and need to be replaced with a “real” CEO to build the company. Steve Jobs 1.0 bought into that myth and it nearly killed Apple; it took Steve Jobs 2.0 to save it.
To practice “first who” means recruiting all the time, keeping yourself highly attuned to stumbling upon great talent wherever you might
But if you do meaningful work you enjoy with people you love, you’ve truly won the lottery.
Take care of your people, not your career. Every responsibility you get, every minibus you drive, every unit you lead—no matter how small—make it a pocket of greatness.
First, you get great people. Then you need to give them something big to do. If you pick something big enough, you’ll need more great people.
We live in a world rich in success but impoverished in meaning. A life of relentless work without meaning is brutal and dark. Most of us will never have the depth of love in our daily work that Manchester had with his fellow Marines. But we can move closer to it by building a culture where people depend on people. And in so doing, you will give people something of immeasurable value—work that matters. And that is truly great.
function of leadership—the number-one responsibility of a leader—is to catalyze a clear and shared vision for the company and to secure commitment to and vigorous pursuit of that vision.
As James MacGregor Burns taught in his classic text, Leadership, we should never confuse brute power with leadership. True leadership only exists if people follow when they would otherwise have the freedom to not follow.
Leadership is the art of getting people to want to do what must be done.
, as a leader, it’s your responsibility to figure out what must be done. You might do this by your own insight and instinct or, more likely, via dialogue and debate with the right people;
it’s not about getting people to do what must be done but about getting them to want to do it.
Just remember that the objective is to make a decision, not to pulverize it with analysis.