Make Your Mark

by Jocelyn K. Glei

What do Dropbox, Nest, Uber, and Airbnb all have in common? Each began as a two- or three-man start-up operation that has been transformed, in seven years or less, from a small idea into a serious business—with a multibillion-dollar valuation to boot. When you step back and look at lightning-fast growth trajectories like these, it’s clear that the rules of business have changed. Many of the classic tenets that have guided great companies for decades are now outmoded or irrelevant at best.

To create just that with Make Your Mark, we went straight to the source, tapping twenty-one leading experts and entrepreneurs for their insights on what’s new and different about building a business right now.

Creativity has many definitions. For me, creativity is solving problems in new ways and conceiving new ways of looking at the world. Creativity can be expressed in many forms, like art, science, and thought. But creativity is all too often undiscoverable and incomprehensible.

This book is about applying the forces of business to creativity. It’s not about making money; it’s about making an impact.

To make an impact with creativity, you must love what you do.

The first thing to understand about building an incredible business is that it’s not about you. Well, it’s not ONLY about you. Rather, it’s about finding the perfect alignment between your specific talents and expertise and what the world needs.

Certain people exude such a powerful presence that they can absolutely captivate you within the very first moment of meeting them. When I was introduced to Bill Thomas at a conference, he was that kind of mesmerizing. A fortysomething, Harvard-trained doctor casually dressed in jeans and Birkenstocks, he took the stage and spoke passionately—with an actor’s eloquence—about aging.

HOW TO FIND YOUR COMPANY’S PURPOSE

What does the world hunger for? What does it desire? What does it need or suffer from a lack of? What are the unique talents of the organization?

Who has the company timelessly been? And who must it fearlessly become?

HOW TO FIND YOUR PERSONAL PURPOSE

To define your personal purpose, start with these questions: How will the world be better off thanks to you having been on this earth? What are your unique gifts and superpowers?

Who have you been when you’ve been at your best? Who must you fearlessly become?

The same process holds true whether you’re a leader doing the hard work of articulating a purpose for your organization or you’re an individual ready to live a more directed life.

PUTTING PURPOSE INTO ACTION Once you’ve vocalized your unique purpose, how exactly does it play out? How do you put it into action?

PURPOSE DRIVES IMPACT, IMPACT REWARDS PURPOSE Purpose compels you to act. It brings into focus the things that matter most.

The impact you have in the world also affirms your purpose. Impact justifies purpose. It fuels purpose. It empowers you to live your purpose more boldly every day.

This is how everyday people can achieve extraordinary things. We listen to that purpose. We achieve things because of our purpose. And that in turn makes each of us hungry to live by our purpose even more. In our own humble way, this is how people become great.

Will you take the next step? Will you invest the time to find your personal purpose? Will you gather your colleagues to define the purpose of your orga...

In the early days of a new business, you make choices—conscious and unconscious—that will influence your culture far into the future. If you’re not careful, those choices can become patterns that limit your ability to thrive. Consider that today’s most trusted and important institutions—in business, health care, government, philanthropy, and beyond—are struggling to stay relevant and useful in the face of new entrants and rapid change. It’s as if they were wired for a completely different environment.

They are comfortable with the unknown; business models and customer value are revealed over time. And most importantly, they are driven by a purpose greater than just profit; each is explicit about how they intend to change the world in some small (or utterly massive) way.

When you consider the speed with which these companies enter and dominate markets, it’s clear that organizations everywhere need to upgrade their OS or they risk extinction. Whether you’re a freelancer with aspirations of building the next great brand or the CEO of a publicly traded company—that means you.

CORE VALUES OF THE RESPONSIVE OS Think of your OS as the sum total of all the values, processes, and methods inside your organization. If the business plan is the “what” of the org, the OS is the “why” and “how.” Put another way, it’s your organizational DNA. Companies that know who they are (i.e., have a strong OS) have an easier time translating their brand into new categories and contexts.

What our research has revealed is that all responsive organizations share a handful of common values that will define the next age of business.

Visionary vs. Commercial Legacy businesses tend to focus on commercial outcomes: to be the number one player in a market or hit an earnings target. For them, success is about business performance. But for responsive companies, vision and impact are paramount. Making a “dent in the universe” trumps anything else they might achieve. Everything they do, including financial success, is in service of that goal.

Tip: Pick a vision that is ambitious and far-reaching enough to last decades, not years. Commit everything to your cause. Ensure that tough decisions are purpose-driven, especially when it hurts.

Lean vs. Large The last age of business was defined in part by an intense desire for growth.

- Tip: Commit to lean business practices that will keep you honest as you scale. Use strategies such as two-pizza teams, short iterative development cycles, weekly scrums, and funding that is unlocked through

Open vs. Closed In decades past, the core value of legacy institutions was isolation—closed doors, offices, silos, departments, and secret innovation processes. One of the major shifts of the digital age has been pervasive connectivity—to each other and to every piece of information ever created.

Tip: Demand a culture of transparent communication. Use new tools to ensure that this is possible, even when team members are working remotely. When in doubt, choose to be open—with your plans, your product, and your data.

Learning vs. Sustaining Once you become successful, you almost certainly have something to lose, and the natural instinct is to protect that success. Large legacy businesses tend to have this attitude. They

Tip: Adopt agile principles and processes wherever possible. Define “survivable risk” and make sure every employee knows what it looks like. As you achieve some measure of success, switch to a bimodal strategy of improving your current products while placing wild bets on new ones.

Emergent vs. Controlled Legacy organizations tend to operate cultures that maintain tight control of the empire.

That future was allowed to emerge. Firms with a Responsive OS rely on an intuition about where to dig but not what they might find. They are open to the possibilities and all the upside that comes with them.

Tip: Let your org structure reveal itself, and pick a method for allowing your company to adapt its structure and processes over time. Start new projects with intuition, letting customer input and user behavior shape your products and services over time.

Legacy behavior is the natural by-product of scale and success, and, as such, we are all susceptible to it. As your business grows and thrives, the greatest lesson from this generation of responsive organizations may well be the notion that we must “upgrade” our approaches and behaviors on a regular basis—tweaking sources of tension, adapting to new technologies, and releasing new versions of ourselves constantly.

The evolution of the Internet as we know it today owes a huge debt to Tim O’Reilly. From Web 2.0 to the open-source and maker movements, O’Reilly has demonstrated a remarkable ability to help ideas take off by giving them “a local habitation and name.” Both an investor and an entrepreneur, O’Reilly also founded O’Reilly Media, whose books and events have played a key role in the spread of programming languages and technology-driven ideas. We talked to O’Reilly about how ideas turn into movements and the power of getting really, really excited about changing the world.

Where do you think great business ideas come from? Innovation starts with enthusiasts.

It could be as simple as a subset of people and you understand what they want in a way that maybe they have not even understood themselves yet.

For me, creating emotionally intelligent stories is about listening and persisting. You keep telling the story and you pull a thread and if it doesn’t break you pull a little harder and . . . Well, it’s not exactly rocket science. Then again, it’s not easy, either.

What I do is look and say, “Is there something people are not realizing that if they understood it, it would help them think differently and more effectively about the future?” I am trying to draw a map of the future based on observations about reality.

So you have to clarify: Who is your actual target? What are you actually trying to accomplish in the world? Everything else should flow from that. That’s what I mean by putting things in the right order.

In a perfect world, new ideas would only be generated in response to glaring problems. Yet, as a culture, we’ve become so obsessed with “innovation” that we imbue it with an intrinsic value all its own. We act as if a new idea is good just because it’s new. But what if we were forced to stop and ask ourselves: “Why do we need that?”

DON’T JUST INVENT SOMETHING, FIX SOMETHING Ideally, the impulse to invent emerges organically, from witnessing—or, even better, experiencing—something that isn’t working and then not being able to rest until you fix it. Now, I’m not trying to make the case that every new idea needs to address world hunger (although, wouldn’t that be nice?); problems come in all sizes and degrees of weightiness. Maybe the problem is that you can’t find a flattering bathing suit, or that your cable bill is frustratingly high. As long as it’s real, and it affects people, it’s a starting place for meaningful innovation.

Of course, it’s natural for entrepreneurs to jump directly to their ideas, which they spend all their time thinking about and obsessing over in the early stages of building their businesses. Presumably they identified the problem long ago and have moved on. But in the early stages of building a brand, the problem you’re solving should be a constant guiding light.

Staying focused on the problem also prevents you from falling into the fatal trap of assuming the world is waiting with bated breath for your product to launch.

FIREPROOFING YOUR IDEA WITH THE “WHY?” TEST Once you’ve identified the problem—a desire or need that a real person might actually have—then it’s time to go deeper. This is called the “why test.” Have you ever spent time with a two-year-old that keeps asking “Why?” no matter what response you give? It’s time to channel that two-year-old. Let’s travel back in time and imagine ourselves in the nineteenth-century equivalent of a hoodie, perhaps it’s a mid-length sack coat, which, according to Wikipedia, replaced the frock coat for less formal occasions. And, exciting news, we just invented the car! Pretty amazing, right? Let’s take a moment to congratulate ourselves and imagine the IPO.

It’s relatively easy to arrive at a one-sentence description of what your product does. But that’s not a brand idea. The best brands, the strongest brands, the ones that everybody loves, stand for a concept that is much greater than the product itself. To use two well-worn examples, Nike isn’t about sneakers; it’s about performance. Apple isn’t about computers; it’s about creativity. Perhaps the car stands for freedom. But you won’t arrive at that conclusion by starting with your product. You get there by starting with people. What do people need, what do they care about, what are their passions and dreams, their desires and fears? Then, and only then, can you begin to understand how your product fits into the equation.

“One does not begin with answers,” the legendary business consultant Peter Drucker once remarked. “One begins by asking, ‘What are our questions?’

The relatively easy questions are the practical ones that are asked on a routine basis: How can we do this or that task a bit more efficiently? Where can we save a few dollars? But questions that address mission and purpose—the “why” of your business—are more challenging. Here are seven such questions. Tackle them early—but learn to live with them, too, because these are questions you should keep asking, again and again, as your business grows and matures.