DETAILS:"...keeping you great" Ten Minutes with the Growth Guy
HEADLINES Print-Friendly Version Sleep Challenges? FORTUNE Small Business magazine is looking for entrepreneurs who either: Please email Anne Fisher [email protected] Koch Industries is Largest Privately Held Company -- with over $98 billion in revenue, Wichita, KS-based Koch Industries is once again at the top of the list of U.S. privately held firms. Just over a year ago, CEO Charles Koch published a book entitled The Science of Success: How Market-Based Management Built The World's Largest Private Company.
I've known Charles for over two decades and I offered this endorsement
"The same exacting thought, rooted in the realities of human nature,
that the framers of the U.S. Constitution put into building a nation of
entrepreneurs, Charles Koch has framed to build an enduring company of
entrepreneurs - a company larger than Microsoft, Dell, HP, and other
giants. Every entrepreneur should study this book." The book IS worth
studying! Skill and Will -- as Charles Koch's book
highlights, the free market economy helps create the "will" to succeed,
which is the main reason, I believe, our public education system is
failing our students. Reflecting back on the Milken Global Conference,
I heard education leaders speak from Singapore, Korea, and Japan -- and
the common theme is that the key to educational success was having
children not only with the "skill" but the "will" to learn. More
importantly, the parents need the "will" to support their children
("more is caught than taught"). From their viewpoint, the American
children they've taught in their international schools generally lack
this will. So right after the conference I sat down with my oldest son
and discussed the need for him to have both the will and the skill to
succeed. He seemed to understand. Will and Skill. Heart and Head. Make
sure it's present in your people and your company. Youth Leadership Development -- yesterday I toured the facilities and had lunch with Richard Rossi, co-founder of Vienna, VA-based Envision EMI.
To date they've provided leadership and personal success education to
almost a half million high achieving young people in seven countries on
five continent -- life skills not typically taught in elementary and
secondary schools. And research shows that when students learn basic
leadership and personal success skills, their academics improve as
well. Students are nominated to participate by their teachers. BTW,
they were just named a third time in 2007 as one of the best places to
work in the DC region and they've been recognized as one of the top
places to work in the U.S. The Most Brains Wins -- my latest monthly "Growth
Guy" syndicated column brought together many of the ideas you've heard
me write and speak about over the past few months -- that whichever
companies tap into the most brains, win! Called "Emergence Theory," I
encourage you to take 5 minutes and scan my column under DETAILS below.
BTW, the brains have to be awake!!
Most Brains Wins! What do Google, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, eBay and Wikipedia have
in common? Besides being six of the fastest growing organizations in
history and making several of their founders billionaires in less than
a decade, they all utilize a new reality of the information age --
whoever leverages the most brains wins! Figure out how to do this
better than your competition and you win big. Sign up for
Verne's Weekly Insights
Jeff Booth's Blog -- CEO of BuildDirect,
a direct supplier of building materials for less, is "controlling the
ink in his industry" with the launch of his blog. And he was kind
enough to blog about his experience
bringing his team to our Rockefeller Habits workshop in Seattle a
couple weeks ago . Entitled "The Best Leadership Course I've Ever
Attended" Booth notes in his blog "I recognize that a small part of me
didn't think we could afford the time for the entire management team to
attend the retreat -- there was so much to do to take two days away
from the business. After spending the time, I cannot believe we did not
do it sooner." Booth was also kind enough to thank his good friends
Pascal Spothelfer, president of BCTIA and Roger Hardy, CEO of Coastal Contacts for "giving me the 'gentle' nudging to attend. You have made a difference." Thanks Jeff, Pascal, and Roger!
By Verne Harnish "Growth Guy"
The subtitle
of James Surowiecki's best-selling book The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the
Many are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes
Business, Economics, Societies, and Nations is another take on this new
strategic weapon. It's no longer sufficient to have just a smart
executive team. You need to launch initiatives to access the collective
wisdom of your employees, customers, and the broader world around you.
Besides reading Surowiecki's book (quicker yet, just read the
collective wisdom of Wikipedia's overview!), read Steven Johnson's
breakthrough book Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains,
Cities, and Software. It's Emergence Theory that drives the success of
the organizations listed above. You not only have to understand and
apply this theory to your business, you need to start doing it
immediately -- so jump on Amazon, another Emergence Theory company, and
place your order.
In past columns I've touched on several approaches to tap into the
collective intelligence of your marketplace including the systematic
gathering of customer and employee feedback and the use of wikis to
capture and organize this information. There is also some innovative
new "community" or "networking" technologies that aid in helping your
customers connect with and help each other and in the process, help
you.
4000 Pages in One Year
Lee Rosen, President of Raleigh-Durham based Rosen Law Firm
(disclosure: they are a client) knew he needed to capture the
intellectual capital of his employees and find a way to efficiently
organize the information necessary to run his thriving law practice
that specializes in divorce cases. Launching an internal wiki, Rosen
notes "I used a $1000 contest to encourage our lawyers and staff to
contribute to the wiki and within a year we had over 4000 pages of
intellectual content!" For more details, Rosen pointed me to a February
2008 FORTUNE Small Business magazine article about how companies are using wikis featuring his firm (Google will help you find the article).
My company recently launched a public wiki devoted to collecting
examples of quarterly themes. Within a few days of announcing the
website, many of our long standing clients took the time to populate
the wiki with past quarterly theme ideas, photos, and detailed
write-ups. This, in turn, is now a valuable resource to the rest of our
clients which strengthens our market position as a source of tools and
ideas for helping executives grow their businesses.
And we decided to house our wiki on a large public site called
AboutUs.org. Founded by one of the top five thought leaders in the wiki
space, Ray King, we were advised to avoid becoming a wiki-island onto
ourselves. Why is this important? A significant and powerful aspect of
wikis is the ability to link to other wiki pages. And it's this
rich-link environment that helps raise the profile of your information
on search engines. So it's important that your wiki, if you want it to
be found by others, is housed where it can connect with many other wiki
pages. If you want to check out the wiki, go to AboutUs.org and search
for "quarterly themes."
IntroNetworks "community"
We've also ventured into the community building aspect of our business.
Whereas I can see teenagers spending a great deal of time on community
websites like Facebook and MySpace, it's been hard for me to imagine
our network of 15,000 executives of growth firms taking the time to
visit and benefit from a networking site. In turn, I know there is a
tremendous amount of shared experience and talent among these
executives if only they could efficiently tap into this reservoir of
knowledge.
Spending $15,000, we licensed a system called IntroNetworks
-- the same system the famous TED conference uses to network their
attendees. What their system does is help the people in your network
build specific profiles and then through the magic of various
algorithms, determines who should talk to whom. Think of it as a
matching/dating service for your customers where they can reach out and
help each other. And since they are your customers, they likely have
various common points of interest.
Within a week of our
IntroNetwork's-supported community, one of the 15,000 executives in our
network contacted me to say he might be able to help with a business
challenge I personally posted on the network site. And it was someone I
didn't even realize was in the network!
We did connect and he was able to help me determine two concrete
courses of action to solve my challenge. For me, that's knowledge I
would have never accessed had there not been the technology to
facilitate the introduction.
At your next executive meeting, tackle the question "how can we
dramatically increase the number of brains we can access to drive our
business." Then do it and let me know what you create -- I need your
brain as well!
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