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As the leader, your job is to push the goals forward, whether you created them or they came from higher up in the organization.
The challenge comes from what your team needs and expects.
It would be typical that your needs for revenue and customer growth would end up working your people harder than they can accept. There’s a gap. So what do you do?
Read the rest of this entry »“More businesses die from indigestion than starvation”
— David Packard
Our culture makes it tempting to want to always grow a business. More customers, more products, more services, more geographical area, more employees … it never ends. Until it does.
This can be true of non-profits as well, just with different words.
Read the rest of this entry »If you’ve done initiatives in business, you’re very familiar with this graph:
Often referred to as a “hockey stick growth chart”, it indicates how revenue will shift from investment mode (on the left) to wonderful growth (on the right). The problem is that this is always used to project the future, not the past. What actually happens is far messier and doesn’t follow a nice pretty growth curve.
This came to mind when I heard recent reports about why WeWork went bankrupt. Since I’ve fallen into this projected-growth trap myself, I thought it might be good to explore how we might do something different.
Read the rest of this entry »I’ve been a strong proponent of the idea that most businesses have an optimal size. This flies in the face of the traditional wisdom that businesses must “grow or die.”
That’s true for some industries and business models, but the vast majority don’t need to follow that.
In fact, for many organizations, “grow or die” can lead to frustration and lousy quality of life. For you, your employees, and customers.
Read the rest of this entry »We tend to think of leadership as something you achieve, then you get to keep it forever. Or at least a long time.
But I’m a member of an amazing service organization, Rotary International, which has the practice of changing leadership every year. I’m signed up to be the president of the club for the 2023-24 year, and I’m starting to get my mind wrapped around the implications of that. And trying not to get stressed out about it.
But I’m keenly aware that I’m just a temporary seatholder in a long string of leaders, going back to 1977 for our club. It’s a humbling realization.
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I’ve written profiles for about 80 values-driven businesses, and one of them shut down last week. As I think about it, there are probably 7 or 8 which have failed in the last five years.
That’s better than average, actually, as the SBA estimated that 95% of startups don’t survive their first five years. But it’s not a comforting thought.
As someone who is trying to do something special, even world-changing, in your business, why don’t statistics like this cause you to just give up?
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RECENTLY I HAD A CHANCE to speak on a panel about nurturing international and cross-cultural relationships. This is a wonderfully rich topic, because it can get to the core of who we are as humans.
Here’s the deal: I think I’m normal, but everyone else is various shades of weird.
We’re all like that.
OLD TOWN MEDIA has developed an amazing reputation in northern Colorado. They’re a creative and thorough marketing agency based in Fort Collins. With a love for office dogs!
Every time I hear someone mention this business, the same words keep popping up:
- Small and personal
- Amazing expertise
When I had the chance to chat with CEO and Founder Miles Kailburn recently. We talked about the phases they’ve gone through since starting the company in 2007.
TODAY I’M HEADED TO DENVER for the Small Giants Summit. This is a fantastic opportunity to interact with other business leaders who thoughtfully reject the pressure to take their companies public.
We make a lot of assumptions in our culture that bigger is better and that growth is even mandatory for survival. The Small Giants Community shows us that you can have much more impact as a privately held company, and there’s an appropriate size for a business at which it is most effective.
Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus have been on a journey they call “Minimalism.” It’s about designing a life which is not based on consumerism, but on what’s really necessary in life.
I had the chance this week to view the great documentary they’ve produced. It’s quite thought-provoking.
It got me thinking about the fact that we’ve built up business approaches which are also based on using way more resources than necessary. The question for me is: Is there such a thing as a minimalist business?
The Values-Based Business 
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