More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
“You just can’t get there from here! You just can’t play the role of The Technician and ignore the roles of The Entrepreneur and The Manager simply because you’re unprepared to play them. “Because, the moment you chose to start a small business, Sarah, you unwittingly chose to play a significantly larger game than any game you had ever played before. “And to play this new game, called building a small business that actually works, your Entrepreneur needs to be coaxed out, nourished, and given the room she needs to expand, and your Manager needs to be supported as well so she can develop her
...more
Adolescence begins at the point in the life of your business when you decide to get some help.
There’s a critical moment in every business when the owner hires his very first employee to do the work he doesn’t know how to do himself,
The Manager—your newfound freedom takes on an all too common form. It’s called Management by Abdication rather than by Delegation. In short, like every small business owner has done before you, you hand the books over to Harry…and run.
It’s the same old story. Walk into any Adolescent business anywhere in the world and you’ll find the owner of the business doing it, doing it, doing it, busy, busy, busy—doing everything that has to get done in his business—despite the fact that he now has people who are supposed to be doing it for him. People he’s paying to do it!
But Harry knew this when he started. He could have told you—his new Boss—that ultimately The Boss always interferes. Harry could have told you that the work will never be done to The Boss’s satisfaction. And the reason is that The Boss always changes his mind about what needs to be done, and how.
Abdication leaves a gap in expectation--unclear goals and metrics. No framework. The key is great delegation--not only handing over responsibility but clarifying what it means to be responsible--to execute well, hit clear goals, and the recipe for the work so they understand when to change the system and make it better
The Technician’s boundary is determined by how much he can do himself.
The Manager’s is defined by how many technicians he can supervise effectively or how many subordinate managers he can organize into a productive effort.
The Entrepreneur’s boundary is a function of how many managers he can engage i...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Harry’s also a technician. He needs more direction than The Technician can give him. He needs to know why he’s doing what he’s doing. He needs to know the result he’s accountable for and the standards against which his work is being evaluated. He also needs to know where the business is going and where his accountabilities fit into its overall strategy.
a manager! And the lack of one causes the business to go into a tailspin.
as the business grows beyond the owner’s Comfort Zone—as
only three ways the business can turn. It can return to Infancy. It can go for broke. Or it...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
You come face to face with the unavoidable truth: You don’t own a business—you own a job!
What’s more, it’s the worst job in the world!
You can’t sell it when you want to, because who wants to buy a job?
self-destructs of its own momentum.
All such “going-for-broke” companies were started with
a Technician who focused on the wrong end of the business, the commodity the business made, rather than the business itself.
Luck and speed and brilliant technology have never been enough, because somebody is always luckier, faster, and technologically brighter.
“Going for broke”
All in--big, uncalibrated cannonball and grasping for salvation.
The most tragic possibility of all for an Adolescent business is that it actually survives!
The culdesac re: Seth godin, the dip
You go into your business every morning with a vengeance, absolutely convinced that it’s a jungle out there, and fully committed to doing whatever’s necessary to survive.
Dark force, negative drive rather than positive intentional pulling forward, misplaced motivations
In Adolescent Survival you’re consumed by the business and the possibility of losing it.
Because Sarah didn’t feel comfortable in this new role, this role of the owner, this role of The Entrepreneur, this role of a businessperson, she left everything up to chance. She abdicated her accountability as an owner and took on the role of just another employee.
“The next time,” I said, “you’ll know that your business is destined to grow, and that once it does your job is going to be significantly different. For now, that’s all you need.
How big can your business naturally become, with the operative word being naturally?
whatever that size is, any limitation you place on its growth is unnatural, shaped not by the market or by your lack of capital (even though that may play a part) but by your own personal limitations.
Your lack of skill, knowledge, and experience, and, most of all, passion, for growing a healthy, functionally ...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
“But to do that requires intention at the outset of the business, entrepreneurial intention, as well as a willingness—no, a true passion—for the personal transformation such a process will call for: accessing new skills, new understanding, new knowledge, new emotional depth, new wisdom.
“So, in this context, a business that ‘gets small again’ is a business reduced to the level of its owner’s personal resistance to change, to its owner’s Comfort Zone, in which the owner waits and works, works and waits, hoping for something positive to happen.
“The tragedy is that all this could have been prevented had the business been started differently, had The Technician suffering from an Entrepreneurial Seizure approached the business in a broader, more entrepreneurial way.
“You could have anticipated that people would love your pies and that the business would therefore have to grow.
“You could have anticipated that growth would bring additional responsibilities, additional skills required, additional capital needed to respond to the added demand that growth always places on a business and on people.
“Simply put, your job is to prepare yourself and your business for growth.
“To educate yourself sufficiently so that, as your business grows, the business’s foundation and structure can carry the additional weight.
“It’s up to you to dictate your business’s rate of growth as best you can by understanding the key processes that need to be performed, the key objectives that need to be achieved, the key position you are aiming your business to hold in the marketplace.
“By asking the right questions, such as: Where do I wish to be? When do I wish to be there? How much capital will that take? How many people, doing what work, and how? What technology will be required? How large a space will be needed, at Benchmark One, at Benchmark Two, at Benchmark Three?
“But all the while, even while you’re guessing, the key is to plan, envision, and articulate what you see in the future both for yourself and for your employees.
Because if you don’t articulate it—I mean, write it down, clearly, so others can understand it—you don’t own it!
“Remember, Sarah, any plan is better than no plan.
A Mature company is started differently than all the rest. A Mature company is founded on a broader perspective, an entrepreneurial perspective, a more intelligent point of view. About building a business that works not because of you but without you.
A Mature business knows how it got to be where it is, and what it must do to get where it wants to go.
Maturity is not an inevitable result of the first two phases.
They started out that way! The people who started them had a totally different perspective about what a business is and why it works.
perspective that makes the difference.
Entrepreneurial Perspective.
I had a model in my mind of what it would look like when the dream—my vision—was in place.
once I had that picture, I then asked myself how a company which looked like that would have to act. I then created a picture of how IBM would act when it was finally done.
I then realized that, unless we began to act that way from the very beginning, we would never get there.
