Tag Archives: Leadership

Secret Judo Guides Start-Up Success

What do you know about martial arts? Here’s a few things I found through a combination of sources:

  • Karate – is a series of punches, blocks and kicks that focuses on strength and offensive techniques; a primary theme is to either put or catch the opponent off guard and then attack.
  • Tae Kwan Do – incorporates many aspects of karate, but with more emphasis on the use of feet and spinning/flying kicks.
  • Jujitsu – uses strikes, kicks, strangles, locks and takedowns to disarm the competition, still aimed at offensive techniques for the most part.
  • Judo – uses throws and its intent is to avoid an opponent’s strength while redirecting its power to one’s benefit.

Tom Tunguz (whom I have quoted before), in his blog Ex Post Facto, encourages entrepreneurs to recognize the highlights of  judo philosophy  in never trying to fight strength with strength, and to find ways to maximize leverage. Tom also references Peter Thiel (from a series of lectures given at Stanford Graduate School of Business) who describes the use of a “secret” to secure a unique niche within your target market. The “secret,” though is not as one would think, but instead “something just not widely believed to be achievable or feasible. In other words, it’s an insight, a thesis that isn’t widely held.” The Secret becomes the “flywheel” of Jim Collins’ strategy – a series of well-executed small decisions that others find it near impossible to duplicate. For many entrepreneurs, the choice of distribution channels is a ripe field for building out one’s “secret.”

Tunguz writes of distribution:

Many companies are now using distribution as their secret – mobile app stores and Facebook Open Graph enable startups to access hundreds of millions of users in ways that incumbents simply aren’t prepared to leverage. Expensify uses mobile app stores to acquire hundreds of thousands of SMBs in ways that their market’s incumbent, Concur (market cap $3B), simply can’t copy. Branchout is building a massive job network on top of Facebook to compete with LinkedIn. If LinkedIn were to copy Branchout, they would marginalize the value of their existing network because LinkedIn would cede their graph to Facebook – an example of the classic “innovator’s dilemma.”

In order to remain relevant, (solve the innovator’s dilemma), entrepreneurs must find a way to continue to grow new ideas within their organizations, less their businesses become to mainstream and lose their uniqueness. This is where/how moving to principles-based strategy trumps reliance on a skilled technician and his or her own suite of strengths and abilities. Continue to recognize what strengths competitors have, then find a way to use those strengths against the competition and towards one’s own competitive advantage!

How Raleigh Can Learn From Chile

In the May issue of Entrepreneur Country, Joe Haslam of Stratemic Capital enlightens readers about the start-up scene in Chile. Most Americans know Chile for its rich produce, not its economic strength in South America, and definitely not for the ecosystem that has been created for entrepreneurship that is paying off handsomely.

Going back to the 1970s, Chile has taken a progressive stance on key economic decisions. Milton Friedman and a number of his associates from the University of Chicago inspired free market systems that have been customized by local conditions. Nicolas Shea and Vivek Wadhwa in the past decade have sought to make Chile a destination for entrepreneurship. Shea attended Stanford University and set about to do a Southern hemisphere version of Silicon Valley. Wadhwa challenged the start-up model of some groups who provide office space near a university and hope for something wonderful to happen. Instead, he advocates a people-centered approach:

To create a tech center like Silicon Valley, you need to first attract smart entrepreneurs from all over the world. Then you have to create entrepreneurial networks; instill a spirit of risk-taking and openness; and build mentoring systems. You also need to provide seed financing to start-ups. The money is easy; everything else requires a change in culture that usually takes decades.

Wadhwa and Shea launched Start-Up Chile at the beginning of 2011. Here’s the concept:

  1. Anyone from anywhere can apply
  2. Winners would be required to move to Santiago, Chile
  3. A one-year visa is provided to facilitate entrepreneurship
  4. $40,000 in seed capital is offered as a prize
  5. The Chilean government would NOT take an equity stake

When Haslam met with the director of Start-Up Chile and a representative from CORFO, the government agency tasked with improving competitiveness in global markets, he asked a lot of questions about how the program was put together. They admitted that bureaucracy had to give way in recognition of results.

  • The website for the contest received more attention than the official national tourism site. 
  • Visitors of the program spent about as much in tourism dollars as the awards themselves.
  • Well-known entrepreneurial icons are “dropping in” on the Chilean scene these days.
  • 1600 applications from 70 countries.
  • 220 foreign start-ups in Chile now, employing 180 locals and 143 abroad.
  • $8 million in VC money has been raised by the first batch of award winners.

Chile has realized some important economic development principles. Notably:

  1. Start-ups are a strong job creation tool.
  2. Large companies are more costly to attract and retain.
  3. Diverse populations experience economic growth.

Earlier this past week, we blogged about Pittsburgh’s Experienced Dreamer contest to attract entrepreneurs to town.  Whether the locale is Santiago, Pittsburgh, or Raleigh, the principles work. We need to do all that we can to foster entrepreneurship–it just may be the key to a healthier world economy!

On a purely local note, Innovate Raleigh has followed some of the steps in the blueprint. We need help from Raleigh Wake Economic Development, mentoring organizations like EntreDot, and fresh sources of seed capital. Additionally, more collaborative workspaces like some of the incubators in our area (Cary Innovation Center being an example) will help foster the natural network nurture necessary. We can do this–but it requires “all hands on deck!”

 

 

Raleigh Needs Experienced Dreamers

This week, I became aware of a very unique contest held in Pittsburgh that recently concluded. The Experienced Dreamers contest was born out of a survey taken by residents in 2009 that indicated that the city must rely on young residents to drive growth. The recommendation of the survey team was that, if the city could attract 1250 entrepreneurs who are 45 and over to move to the area and start a business, the economic impact over the next two decades would be $2.5 BILLION!

Here were the rules:

  1. The applicant must be 45 or older as of the date of application,
  2. The applicant may not have lived with 100 miles of the city for the past 10 years, and
  3. The applicant must be a U.S. citizen or permanent legal resident as of the application date.

The applicants were charged with locating a new business, philanthropy, or artistic endeavor in Pittsburgh upon award of $50,000 in cash and an additional $50,000 in charitable trust in the recipient’s name. This year’s winner is Tess Almendarez Lojacono, a 55-year-old artist who has been living in East Aurora, NY. Her proposal was to move and enlarge Fine Art Miracles, a five-year-old company she started that teaches fine art classes to residents of assisted living facilities and nursing homes. Lojacono has  a stated objective to provide intellectual stimulation for older people and to help them tap their creativity.

In her own words, “I like to show people that they’re still able to create.” “We’re offering something a little more intellectually challenging for them than painting between the lines, and a lot of them really like that. We have older gentlemen who sign up for our classes who wouldn’t do crafts.”

An article at http://www.SecondAct.com told a little more of her story:

She incorporates art history and a lot of visual aids into her classes. After showing participants reproductions of Georgia O’Keefe’s floral portraits, for example, she invites them to create their own versions on black art paper. She’ll provide as little or as much assistance as her students need.

“We find that even people in their eighties and nineties are interested in learning something new,” Lojacono says. “I’ve developed a lot of respect for their intellects.”

Part of her job is helping people who haven’t previously tried making art to get over their perception that it’s an activity only for a creative elite. “They’ll say, I can’t draw a line with a ruler,” she says. “I’ll say, ‘that’s great. I don’t want any straight lines in here.’ We start with a blank sheet of paper. What I find, though, is that when I help them to draw, pretty soon they’re sitting up straight and smiling.”

The amazing thing that occurs to me is “why aren’t more cities doing this?” Raleigh, North Carolina, where I live, is a top-rated city and part of the Research Triangle Park region, known to be a hotbed of entrepreneurship, but with little emphasis on attracting “boomerpreneurs.” Clearly, experience counts in running a business. Older start-up founders are seemingly more likely to have more capital than their younger counterparts. Since under-capitalization is the bane of many new businesses, an effort to attract entrepreneurs with greater net worth would make good sense as part of an economic development strategy.

Innovate Raleigh has identified a number of initiatives to foster greater cross-institutional cooperation for the betterment of the local economy. While we need to continue to foster business start-ups coming out of the education of our young students, we should also have a strategy for the bigger demographic of “Experienced Dreamers!”

 

Content That Speaks C-Suite Language

 

Roanne Neuwirth of the Farland Group (http://www.farlandgroup.com/) writes in a post this week for The Content Marketing Institute that McKinsey & Co has mastered the language of the c-suite. McKinsey Quarterly newsletters are read by corporate executives because the subject matter is engaging, relevant, and contains key topics related to global business excellence. Here’s what distinguishes their approach to content that has proven to be so effective:

Data-driven credibility. Whether a survey of hundreds of technology executives or interviews with 15 chief strategy officers, McKinsey starts with peer  insights and gets compelling facts on which to build their content.

Actionable, relevant, timely information. McKinsey focuses on leading-edge management topics that are  top of mind for executives and shares cases, examples and stories of how other executives have taken action on the opportunities and challenges presented. It’s easy to see how to take these ideas into other environments.

Succinct insights. McKinsey extracts the key points, the most relevant highlights and the most provocative  ideas in the layout and design making the key takeaways easily identifiable and consumable.

Channeling their audience. McKinsey moved its  model to a stronger focus on online formats (audio, video, print) and shifted the print publication to quarterly round-ups. It has integrated a strong social and email strategy to ensure that the content gets to executives in formats that matter.

Even though top executives can be challenging to approach, it is well worth the effort. They control the purse strings.  For marketers in the B2B setting, knowing how to attract and engage the attention and commitment of this critical target audience can make a business very successful.

 

Know that top executives think Return On Investment continuously—whether the investment is their time or the purchasing power they wield. As a rule, the psychographic mindset of the C-suite is to trust a small handful of advisors as subject matter experts. Inherently, most sales approaches are mistrusted and it is very hard to gain enough gravitas to be heard among all the voices clamoring for the right to earn the respect and trust sought.

 

Farland recommends the following guidelines for their clients to penetrate the C-suite “blockade”:

  1. Hard facts drive credibility… and credibility is key. Content based on data makes an impression on executives; peer-based insights and stories add to the credibility of the data collected
  2. Provide actionable and timely information on issues that matter, in formats that allow ready extrapolation. There has to be a “so what” that comes out of the data and it needs to be up-to-the minute, on topics relevant to the executive’s business, role, and current challenges.
  3. Summarize, summarize, summarize. Deliver your ideas with targeted summaries, succinct points, where the bottom line ideas and actions are easy to extract and consume.
  4. Channel matters. With executives in particular, the content has to be easy for them to access, wherever they are — on their iPad during a flight, in a printed paper to peruse after dinner, or in a short video while waiting for a meeting to start.
  5. Push beyond the common wisdom and top-of-mind trends. Executive content needs to present a provocative vision for future possibilities.
  6. Evolve from technical to strategic. Executives are not interested in reading about technologies and products—those are only a means to an end…Position solutions in terms of the bottom line and what can help grow the business.


Like Being in a Rut?

As a business owner, every day brings new challenges and issues that demand our attention. When 100% of our time is given to doing the business (marketing, selling, making, fixing, shipping, accounting, etc.), we’re stuck.  We’re in a rut that (often) leads to failure. Perhaps not failure in the sense of going out of business or having to take a day job, but a missed opportunity to see the business become what it could/should be.

It’s a common trap we can all fall into.  We have something the market wants.  Demand increases and the technical activity associated with getting and filling orders completely fills our schedules.  Forty hours per week becomes fifty and then sixty.  We start taking work home (it’s a sign when what we once enjoyed becomes work).  Everything becomes more mechanical.  We lose balance often at the same time our business is losing steam.

When we’re in the rut, the solution appears to be counter-intuitive and impossible to execute, but we must allocate a portion of our time to work on the business if we want our business to survive.  It’s not optional – it’s essential. You may have heard the admonition to not work in your business at the expense of working on it–the question, though, becomes “how?”

We need to continually infuse creativity into our business–if we want to stay out of the rut.  That won’t happen if we don’t:  1) purposefully allocate time for it and 2) utilize an agenda that maximizes the creative input in the time allocated. The best solution to infuse the most creativity in the shortest amount of time is setting aside 5 days per year with your executive leadership team and 90 minutes or less per week (5% to 6% of your total work hours), using specific agendas to extract creative input to prioritize, solve your issues, maintain focus and advance your company.

Applied faithfully, this regimen will move you and your company to a top performing level. Rather than rehashing worn out frustrations, being stymied in your rate of growth, or feeling like you have to come up with all the answers by yourself, you will find freedom, organization, and synergy flowing from your efforts. Dare to try it!

A special thanks to Don Tinney, who posted many of the concepts above in a blog entry this week at http://www.eosworldwide.com