Better Than Capitalism

It’s been said that we get the culture we deserve.

It’s as true in politics as it is in business as it is in home life.

We are building our culture every day. When we make decisions or don’t. When we cut corners or insist on doing it right. When we give up or press on.

And the thing is, you never build your culture in a vacuum. It will rub up against the outside world and pick up scratches and nicks. It will bleed into everything that it touches. And you don’t get to control how those things happen.

The one thing we can control is how deliberate we are about creating our culture; we can focus on creating a certain kind of culture.

That focus means changing. You. Your motivations. Your habits. What you will do and what you won’t do. When you’ll do it. How you’ll do it.

Why you’ll do it.

So take half an hour today and make your first decision. Make a list of your most important priorities. Rank them against each other and put them in order of importance. Be radically honest with yourself. Make sure to include things you know you need to change. Then do something to affect the top one. Keep at it until you can knock out the top three, then reevaluate.

I’ll offer one suggestion: make at least one of your top three priorities something that benefits someone else but not you. It doesn’t have to be huge but it should be meaningful.

 

There are, no doubt, plenty of capitalists who would disagree with me about why we should do business. I’m good with that.

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In The People’s Tycoon, Steven Watts spends a fair bit of time discussing Henry Ford’s Five-Dollar Day. For those of you who are unfamiliar, the Five-Dollar Day was how Henry Ford described his decision to double the minimum wage of every employee working for him, so that they made at least $5 every day.

I was surprised to learn that it was James Couzens, Henry’s “hard-driving business manager,” who urged Henry to make the change and became his strongest ally after its introduction.

Couzens came into his support of the Five-Dollar Day gradually but once he was convinced he was vocal in his advocacy, with Henry and with the American people. He argued that paying high wages, and being concerned with the personal needs of your employees, was good business. “If you are going to get the best possible service from a wage worker you must remember that he is a man and treat him as a man.”¹ He also came to feel strongly that the money being generated by the company was “a trust . . . . a responsibility, and a tough one.”

Not everyone agreed with Ford’s decision. No less an authority than The Wall Street Journal declared that “[t]o inject ten millions into a company’s factory, and to double the minimum wage, without regard to length of service, is to apply Biblical or spiritual principles into a field where they do not belong.”²

As a believer in free markets, the Wall Street Journal‘s response makes no sense to me. As long as the decision is not coerced, it’s absolutely beyond me how any personal religious, moral, or ethical principles could be inappropriate criteria for such a decision in a free market.

Quite the contrary; since the market is the (sometimes imaginary) place where we bargain with other people for the things we want, where we offer them the best reasons and justifications we can, there’s no better place for the introduction of Biblical or spiritual principles.

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I talked last week about a statement Jeb Bush made while stumping out here in Utah. He said conservatives will “win when our message is hopeful and optimistic; when we apply conservative principles to help everybody rise up, not just those that have already made it.”

As a conservative millennial and an adherent of free markets, I’m concerned by how many of my peers voice their support for socialism.³ But I’m not surprised by it.

What the Republicans and the big-C Capitalists apparently fail to realize is that not every complaint about conservatism and capitalism is the whining of spoiled kids with a liberal-entitlement mindset. Looking around myself, I have to admit that at least some of the complaints about conservatism and capitalism stem from the real frustration—the inability to effect a meaningful change in their situation—that many people feel.

Having accepted that there is a real issue there, however deep it’s buried, I also have to believe that we should try to fix it if we can.

The argument between the Republicans and the Democrats, the capitalists and the socialists, centers on how to run an economy. It’s an argument that runs deep and hot. And frankly, the capitalists are losing it.

But they’re not losing the argument because capitalism is an inferior system to socialism. Even China, the last real holdout of institutionalized socialism in the modern world, has moved strongly toward open markets.

No, capitalists are not losing because of their views on how to run an economy. They’re losing the argument because of their views about why we should run our economy. I’m a bit surprised that Jeb Bush is the only presidential candidate who seems to have grasped this idea.

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This is at the core of my ideas about why we should do business.  Conservatives will only start winning again when we start addressing those real concerns that keep driving people to Bernie Sanders and socialism. Capitalists and businessmen will only shake the reputation for overweening greed when our decision-making flatly rejects the possibility of making an extra 0.5% profit at the expense of our employee’s interests.

There’s no need to abandon the free market in order to accomplish what I’m proposing. Socialism won’t work; it doesn’t allow for sufficient personal direction. But capitalism, as an ideal, is too laden with baggage to be an effective vehicle either. What we need is something better than capitalism.

When I figure out what to call it, I’ll let you know.

I really struggled last week to express the point I was trying to make. Eventually, because I ran out of time, I had to hit the “Publish” button even though I hadn’t been able to say what I really meant.

In the professional world where I live, founders frequently introduce their approach to business by explaining that they’re not building “lifestyle companies.” The suggestion seems to be that lifestyle companies are content to schlep along with waste and inefficiency but that this company will win by being lean, mean, and agile. I suppose the explanation comes out of the impulse to convince investors that the founders will spend money wisely instead of blowing millions on narcissistic indulgences, and to that extent it’s probably a good thing.

In any event, this perspective about lifestyle companies isn’t uncommon. In my experience, it’s pretty much de rigueur for a startup founder.

So as I spent time thinking last week about not building a lifestyle company, I wondered how framing the concept like that affects the choices that startup founders make. In other words, I wonder whether the determination not to build a lifestyle company is a conclusion founders reach or an assumption that they make.

It’s an important distinction.

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My first attempt at writing last week was to resurrect an old draft I had written and then abandoned around this time last year. One of the first people to comment on this blog—maybe the first person to comment about this blog—advised his social circles to “try to ignore some of the politically charged phrasing” in my first few posts. I was simultaneously amused, frustrated, and left in a bit of a pique by his comment because I was deliberately trying not to strike a political tone, partly because I’m writing a blog about otherishness and business, not politics, but also because I don’t want to be pigeonholed. I’ve thought about his comment every time I’ve sat down to write.

I’m a conservative guy. I am a Mormon kid from Idaho after all. A lot of what I write is influenced by my understanding of what my scriptures teach. I’ve spent more time reading and thinking about uber-conservative thinking by guys like Adam Smith, Milton Friedman, and Friedrich Hayek than anyone I personally know. But I also survived law school and I read plenty of excellent writing and thinking by people who are as different from me politically as it’s possible to be. What I’m sharing here is a distillation of a theme that runs through all of their writing.

As I thought about how I would address last week’s post tonight, I realized that worrying about how some readers might pigeonhole me is silly. Mostly it’s silly because there are like 12 of you and most of you already know me well enough that pigeonholing is the least of my problems. But it’s also silly because worrying about what you’ll think (or whether you’ll agree) makes it harder to say what I’m here to say. In the end, I realized I’m here to share the insights I’ve had that I’ve never seen anyone else express. No surprise that they might not be appreciated by everyone.

So my worry about being pigeonholed was an assumption I made, not a conclusion I reached.

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A few days ago I was listening to the radio on the way to work. I typically flip between ’90s alt-rock, conservative talk radio, NPR, and classical music because I can only take any one of them for a few minutes at a time.

As one of the local talk shows started up, the host ran a quote from some guy I didn’t recognize. The speaker said, “We win when our message is hopeful and optimistic; when we apply conservative principles to help everybody rise up, not just those that have already made it.”¹

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Now to tie it all together:

The assumptions that we make about life, about business, about our economy, our politics, and pretty much everything else we do, shape the way we construct our world. They do this because they are intimately connected with, and ultimately give definition to, the way we perceive the world around us.

Because our assumptions are so powerful, they have two consequences. First, they’re a useful, rational sort of shorthand for understanding the world. We’re bombarded with information and we need a way to sort through it quickly. Our assumptions give us an effective tool to do that.

The second consequence is related. Because assumptions sort in a binary sort of way—think square peg in a round hole—they also often lead us to discard ideas that aren’t familiar before we’ve had a chance to think about them carefully. We don’t have time to file down the edges or try another hole because we’ve already discarded the idea that wasn’t what we expected. This rapid process of comparing and discarding reinforces our assumptions because it feels like progress; we can look around and say “I considered 1,472 different ideas, discarded 1,471 and kept one that worked.”

That’s the same sort of shorthand founders use when they explain they’re not building a lifestyle business. They’re trying to persuade their investors to invest by giving them something that fits the assumption that the opposite of a lean, efficient organization is “just” a lifestyle business.

But using the shorthand also determines how the founders will interact with their business. Every time they face a decision, part of the calculus will be “Is this what lifestyle businesses do?” If the answer to that question is yes, that option will usually join the 1,470 other discarded ideas on the floor without further question.

But if you do that, do you know what your alternatives actually are? Do you really need to become the next unicorn? Are you sure you can’t build a lean, efficient business that will reach your goals and be a lifestyle business at the same time?

Making such a decision without considering these and other alternatives will prevent founders from ever becoming truly otherish in business, to the detriment of those founders and the system.

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I’m writing this blog to explain (and explore) how to apply free-market principles in a way that will help everybody rise up, not just those who’ve already made it. That has implications for my politics, for my economic outlook, and simply for the way I view the world. The beauty of the free market is that if I’m right (and if I’m good enough at explaining it to you) maybe I’ll convince a few of you along the way.

 

I ran across an article on VentureHacks this week that neatly encapsulated one of the core principles of managing employees in an otherish business:

“we don’t pay you to work here–we pay you so you can work here.”

This principle was tied to another important insight:

“The problem isn’t that money is a weak motivator. The problem is that money is a terribly strong motivator. By itself, money motivates the wrong people to do the wrong things in the quest for more money.”

If both of those things are true, it means there are some pretty perverse incentives in the way most businesses approach hiring and compensation. Most employers of which I am aware approach hiring as if the the exchange is a simple market transaction. In this model, the company is interested in buying the employee’s time and skill at the lowest possible price. The employee’s interest, on the other hand, is to sell his particular services at the highest price he can. The result is a transaction that fits neatly onto the traditional demand/supply curve we remember from Econ 101.

What we miss, and what the post on VentureHacks accurately perceives, is that paying an employee to work for you focuses the transaction on how much money the employee can make. If he can make more, he goes somewhere else. If not, he’ll bluff and try to get as much out of us as he can.

So much for trust.

 

I’ve been reading about attachment theory lately. It’s a really complex, fascinating subject. As I understand it now, I’d summarize its basic principle this way: people have a basic need to trust that those with whom they most closely associate understand and value them. Psychologists have applied the theory to both the parent-child relationship and to the relationships between lovers. They posit that many of the long-term impairments to these relationships arise because one or both of the people in the relationships feel misunderstood or undervalued by the other person.

I wonder if attachment theory might help us understand how better to do business.

One of the key aspects of a business is trust. Sometimes leaders ask employees simply to trust their judgment on faith. The idea that employees should trust their managers is so commonly accepted that it’s almost axiomatic.

How often does it go the other way?

One of the most critical skills a leader can develop is to trust her team. Another is the ability to develop trust in others. I think it’s really important to understand that concept: trusting and developing trust are skills, not merely feelings. While trust is reinforced by positive experiences, it grows only when it is successfully extended beyond its demonstrated range.

To put it another way: we cannot trust without a bit of hope. We hope that our employees will do the right thing and we then give them the freedom to go and try. They hope that we’ve got their interests at the front of our minds as they put their livelihood in our hands.

Success in business depends as much on whether we’ve properly prepared our employees as it does on whether they’ve properly prepared themselves. But trust doesn’t exist in the preparation. It comes into being when we choose to hope for an outcome enough to take a step into the dark. It grows when our feet hit solid ground.

 

 

Over the last year I’ve spent a fair bit of time talking about Dan Price and his experiment in raising the the minimum salary at Gravity Payments to $70,000 a year.

Wages are a devilishly tricky issue. They’re not the best predictor of employee satisfaction. High wages won’t guarantee success. And managers rightly worry about overpaying an under-performing employee.

Wages are tricky because when you hire an employee, you have a problem: you have work that needs to be done and you need someone who will just do it but you don’t really know if you can trust them.

And so we’ve come up with an elaborate set of tools to help weed out the employees we can’t trust. We ask for resumes and then screen them against the minimum qualifications for the job. We define KPIs and MVPs and measure them ad infinitum. We institute 360-degree, peer-based, annual performance reviews and grade our employees against predefined rubrics. All the while, we’re setting expectations and looking for signals about whether we can trust them.

It’s not just us. Our best employees hire us just as much as we hire them. They know that they shouldn’t just take a job because it’s available. They have goals of their own and they’ll use the opportunity to work for us as a platform from which to reach their own goals. And like us, they’re constantly watching for signals about whether they can trust us.

At its core, then, the employment relationship is just that: it’s a relationship.

As with any relationship, the initial signals we send about our intentions will strongly influence its eventual success. Long-term relationships can be strengthened by the shared experience of the group. But at the beginning of the relationship, the signals are all we have.

Because the signals are all we have, getting the conversation about wages right is critical. What we offer will stand as a proxy for our expectations about the relationship with our employees. Without the benefit of experience (and often with it) our employees will judge our commitment to the relationship based on how we propose to pay them.

That’s why paying employees like Dan Price does is the right idea. Paying employees significantly above the market ought to make us very careful about properly defining the relationship with them because it will be a costly mistake if we don’t. And when we put our money where our mouth is, it’s hard to ignore.

If you’re the kind of person who reads this blog out of personal interest and not merely out of maternal loyalty (thanks Mom!) you most likely know a bit about Clayton Christensen. There’s a reason I’ve quoted him as much as I have: he’s one of the world’s foremost business thinkers and it’s really not an exaggeration to say that his theory about disruptive innovation has changed the way our world works.

This week I read an article he wrote called The Capitalist’s Dilemma. In that article, Clayton and his co-author, Derek van Bever, describe spreadsheets as “the fast food of strategic decision making.” Very briefly, they highlight how the popularity of spreadsheets “has given rise to an unhealthy dependence” on financial metrics in modern business.

Clayton and Derek quote Scott Cook, the founder of Intuit, who observes that focusing on financial outcomes too early in the innovation process produces “a withering of ambition.” Explaining that financial metrics lack predictive power, Scott says “Every one of our tragic and costly new business failures had a succession of great-looking financial spreadsheets.” In response to this failure of spreadsheet-based decision-making, Scott explains, his new-product teams no longer submit a spreadsheet to justify new innovation, they focus instead on “where we can change lives most profoundly.”

I love this idea.

I love it even more because of the tension that it creates with another idea I’ve talked about: the idea that a great business idea is simply a spreadsheet with a skin on.

Spreadsheets are familiar. They’re ubiquitous. And they offer the siren clarity of black-and-white numbers. But because spreadsheets lack predictive power, they’re also like James Surowiecki’s noisy crowds: when spreadsheets tell us what to do they override our decision-making process in a way that leaves us searching for someone (or something) else’s expectation about the value of our business.

That’s a really perverse role for such a powerful tool. Instead of allocating our time, our money, and our emotional energy to the strategies we really want to implement, this sort of reliance on the spreadsheet pushes us to change our behavior in order to satisfy people who don’t have the same information, the same dedication, or even the same goals we have.

So by all means, make sure your business plan makes financial sense. But don’t let the spreadsheet fool you. Capitalism is not finance, success is not a high internal rate of return, and otherishness is a spectacular way to create healthy business.

 

 

 

 

This week I read an article on LinkedIn by Jan Rutherford. In his article, he briefly reviews a book called Leadership BS by Jeffrey Pfeffer, who is a professor at Stanford University.

Apparently, in Leadership BS Jeff teaches that the leadership development industry, with all of its self-help books, executive coaching, and deep thinking, is not delivering an ROI.

Over the last year I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the ROI of this blog. If you’re calculating the ROI based on how much money I’ve gotten out of it, it’s a clear loser. But I’m not doing it for the money. As long as I keep it up, the blog and all of its content will be free.

The ROI of a blog like this is two-fold. First, the blog is a way for me to work on my ideas. It forces me to shape my thoughts into something resembling coherence at least once a week.

The second part of the ROI comes from people putting these ideas into practice. It exists in building what Jeff calls an “environment in which ordinary, albeit conscientious, people can reliably produce desirable results.”

That’s why it’s so important to think about why we’re in business. As Clayton Christensen said in How Will You Measure Your Life: “How do you make sure that you’re implementing the strategy you really want to implement? Watch where your resources flow . . . . Because if the decisions you make about where you invest your blood, sweat, and tears are not consistent with the person you aspire to be, you’ll never become that person.”

It’s just as true of business as it is of people.

What job were you hired to do?

That’s a funny question to ask an entrepreneur. Ask a dozen business owners and you’ll probably get more than a few funny looks in return. Then maybe some answers like this:

“What do you mean? I wasn’t hired, I hired the employees.”

“I wasn’t hired to do a job. I needed work and found that I was good at this, so I started selling it. And I’ve never worked a day since.”

Other business owners might sense that there’s another question lurking nearby. They’d tell you that they’re “hired” by their customers to do a job well. Or that they were hired to be your personal executive assistant, or to make your house stun passersby, or to make sure you don’t die while you’re using a ladder.

In his book, How Will You Measure Your Life, Clayton Christensen asks his readers the same question: what job are you being hired for?

To help his readers understand, Clayton uses the example of a friend of his who came home from work one afternoon to find the breakfast dishes still on the table and no evidence of dinner. Sensing his wife had had a rough day and needed a hand, he didn’t say anything, he just cleared the dishes and started making dinner. As he did so, his wife quietly disappeared upstairs. Finding her in their bedroom after he began feeding the kids, he expected to be thanked for helping out, only to find that she was very upset—at him.

As they talked, the realization dawned on him. His wife explained that she hadn’t had a hard day because of the chores. It had been difficult because she had spent hours and hours with small demanding children and hadn’t spoken to another adult all day. What she needed most right then was a real conversation and he had essentially given her the silent treatment, all the while thinking he was doing her a favor.

Clayton concludes, suggesting that if we studied the subject, “we would find that the husbands and wives who are most loyal to each other are those who have figured out the jobs that their partner needs to be done—and then they do the job reliably and well.” He then continues, “[t]his principle—that sacrifice deepens commitment—doesn’t just work in marriages. It applies to members of our family and close friends, as well as organizations and even cultures and nations.”

This is what I meant when I said we have to change our passions and learn to be passionate about helping someone else. It’s not just about helping our customers, that’s table stakes. Any business that doesn’t take care of its customers is destined for failure.

No, as employers, we have been hired by our employees to do even more important jobs, jobs that make the importance of meeting financial targets and creating network effects pale in comparison. We’ve been hired to take risks that they can’t. We’ve been hired to bring stability. We’ve been hired to have a vision, to shape it, and to help them see it. We’ve been hired to have expectations and then to provide a platform from which leaping can occur.

We can’t do those things without sacrificing our own reasons for doing business.

But that’s the job we were hired to do.

In the opening pages of Smart People Should Build Things, Andrew Yang explains that we’ve made a mistake. According to Andrew, “[w]e’ve let the market dictate what our smart kids do, and they’re being systematically funneled into obvious structured paths that don’t serve them or the economy terribly well.” Essentially, we’ve made exactly the mistake James Surowiecki warned us against in The Wisdom of Crowds: we’ve taught our kids to accept what somebody else says they should do instead of doing what they think they should do.

The answer to this problem, according to many writers, is to follow our passions.

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I haven’t always liked business books. Truth be told, I still don’t like a lot of them. Like hucksters who sell you books about how to make a million bucks (write a book!), too many business writers tell you saccharine stories about how you’ll find ultimate happiness if you’ll just find your calling and then follow it.

Bah. Humbug.

Simply having a passion isn’t enough. Passions fade. Passions can mislead. Worse yet, some passions feed only themselves. Those passions are dangerous because they’re insatiable.

In the end, a lot of our “passion” is really just distraction dressed up and paraded about so we don’t have to deal with the work that is challenging and difficult and scary and meaningful.

I’m not saying don’t be passionate.

I’m saying learn to be passionate about work that serves more than just yourself.

Corporations may exist to maximize shareholder profits, but we don’t. Business, trade, the free market, they all exist to serve our self-interest. But even Adam Smith recognized that our self-interest is broad enough to encompass the well-being of our friends and neighbors. Truth be told, we exist to serve other people. That’s how we connect. That’s how we create art.

What Andrew Yang is doing with Venture For America is an important aspect of fixing the way people think about their jobs. We have to get people to stop thinking that the way to get ahead is to just do whatever pays $120k per year. To do that we’ve got to get them thinking about what matters most.

But in the end, just chasing our passions won’t do it. We have to change our passions. If we’re passionate about the ease that $120k per year can buy, it’s gonna be awfully hard to blaze a new trail. But if we’ll learn to be passionate about helping someone else (it almost doesn’t matter who), we’ll find that there are plenty of people to keep us meaningfully engaged long after selfish passion quits satisfying.

Brad Feld, one of my favorite business bloggers recently posted about horizontal and vertical scaling. Like he says, the Wikipedia definitions of horizontal and vertical scaling are both simple and useful:

• Scale Vertically (or “scale up”): Add resources to a single node in a system, typically involving the addition of CPUs or memory to a single computer.
• Scale Horizontally (or “scale out”): Add more nodes to a system, such as adding a new computer to a distributed software application.

In business, entrepreneurs very often think vertically first. You open your shop and get to work selling widgets. Pretty soon, you realize that if you add employees, you can make your little node in the market more efficient. And so a small shop turns into a bigger shop which sometimes turns into a Really Big Shop.

At some point, you realize that you can’t usefully employ another body at the shop, so you figure out horizontal scaling: you replicate the system and hire a manager to run another Really Big Shop doing the same things in the next town over.

Neither kind of scaling is better than the other, they’re suited to different problems. But the best organizations figure out the right mix between vertical and horizontal scaling in how they do their work and then they run with it.

Otherishness in business is a question of how well we apply vertical and horizontal scaling to why we work.

Business owners and employees also tend to think vertically first. Because we primarily work for our own well-being, we want to increase our salary and our top line revenue as much as possible.

But at some point, we’ll realize that we can’t usefully use another dollar or another day of vacation. When that happens we have to find another reason to work. If our reason for working includes someone else’s well-being, then every time we manage to help another person replicate our success, we’re scaling horizontally.

And if you ask me, the best organizations figure out the right mix between vertical and horizontal scaling in why they do their work and then they run with it.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about Adam Grant’s book, Give and Take.

In his book, Adam says that becoming otherish in a business context would require “dramatic changes in the way that organizations hire, evaluate, reward, and promote people. It would mean paying attention not only to the productivity of individual people but also to the ripple effects of this productivity on others.”

That’s what would happen if we were each individually otherish in our work.

But a business focused on otherishness would be another thing altogether.

The reason most businesses aren’t otherish isn’t because that way isn’t profitable. It’s because that way is much harder. Taking home more money this year is way easier than borrowing money so you can give it away. Focusing on doubling sales is easier than focusing on doubling the number of employees you’ve helped become better salespeople.

A business that focused on how it helped its employees instead of its shareholders would require equally dramatic changes in the way that it hired, evaluated, rewarded, and promoted its people. More importantly, it would mean that its productivity would no longer be measured by the profit that it made.

Its productivity would be measured by the lives it touched. It would be measured by the number of people it trained and sent on to greater heights. It would be measured by how it changed business.

 

My wife just walked over to the computer, where I’ve been staring blankly at the screen for the last several minutes.

“I don’t have any idea what I’m going to write tonight.”

“Then just say that.”

So here I am. Without a clue.

It’s not the first time. And it’s not for a lack of thinking about this little blog problem I have. My wife will be the first to confirm that I spend too much time thinking about this project.

And as I write this, I realize it’s a lot like what faces us in business. We have an idea we want to try or a need to fill. But what’s between that and reality, we really have no idea.

Seth Godin talks constantly about delivering. I’m reading “The Icarus Deception” right now, where it’s a constant theme. You don’t always know what to do or how you’re gonna do it. But at some point you’ve got to decide you’re gonna be the one who just starts making it work. Which is a great idea if you’ve got an Idea, but a lot harder when you don’t.

It seems to me that the answer to our problem of not knowing what to do stems, at least in part, from the delusion that we should know what to do.

This last week or two I’ve been thinking a lot about helping my kids. I’ve got four of them and I’m frequently struck with the overpowering conviction that I have no idea what I’m doing. So as I was pondering on the subject last week, it occurred to me that there are a few questions I should ask my kids every day:

• What are you learning?
• What would you like to be learning?
• What would help you finish your work?
• How can I help you?

I doubt it would be effective if I started peppering these questions at them every day after work. Rapid-fire interrogation has a way of making their eyes glaze over, I see it every time I tell them “‘Because’ isn’t a reason, it’s a conjunction.” But I’m a wily guy and I’ve been around for a bit, so I figure I can work these four questions into our conversations without them even noticing for a while.

Anyway, right after I wrote those four questions, I realized there are a corollary set of questions applicable to work. They are:

• What are you working on?
• What would you like to be working on?
• What would help you finish your work?
• How can I help you?

Now, I’m not the first guy to come up with this series of questions (or one very much like it). Doug Conant has me beat by at least 14 years, and Moses’ father-in-law had the wisdom to ask nearly 3500 years ago.

You see, the thing that ties Doug Conant in with Moses is that there’s really no way we’re going to have all the answers all the time. But as entrepreneurs, it’s not our job to have all the answers. If entrepreneurship really means leadership, then our job is to define the vision and then to make sure the team is unified around the vision.

Neal A. Maxwell defined a useful framework for defining a vision and encouraging team unity:

1. Define the problem;
2. gather ideas;
3. test the ideas;
4. choose among the ideas; and
5. plan the action.¹

And that’s where the questions come in. If we handle it right, these questions will walk us right through the five elements of Neal’s framework. At the same time, they’ll help us understand where our kids’ employees’ heads are at. We’ll understand pretty quickly whether they understand the vision, whether they support it, whether they’re on board but not sure what to do next, or whether the task at hand is more than they’re competent to handle. If we don’t use the questions as an excuse to take over, the questions will also reinforce our trust in them.

And the best part is, if we get real answers to our questions we might just start to have a clue.

In 1910, Theodore Roosevelt gave a speech titled “The Man in the Arena” at the Sorbonne in Paris. From that speech comes this famous quote:

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

I’ve had a post about this quote in mind since I started writing the blog, but I couldn’t remember who said it or how exactly it went, so the few times I’ve gone looking for it I came up empty-handed. Lucky for me, a friend of mine sent it to me today for a totally unrelated reason and now I have it.

I started writing this blog as a way to force myself to make my thoughts coherent. I hoped to be able to collect and organize some of the best business thinking in a way that would persuade some of you to change your minds about why we work.

When I was in law school and first thinking about these ideas, I briefly considered a career in academia, where I could research and write papers on the subject. But I realized that if I did that, I’d just end up writing for a small group of other academic lawyers who really wouldn’t understand what entrepreneurship means because they would never experience it.

So as I write these posts, I want to avoid the trap of being a mere critic. After all, I’m not an employer. I’m still not even in the arena.

We ought to give a great deal of credit to those people who do take the risk of business ownership. Most of them, in the United States anyway, have no formal business education at all. They’re mostly just regular people who need to feed their families and along the way they figure out they can make life more comfortable by hiring some employees. Some of them are so busy just trying to get their thing going that they wouldn’t have time to read this blog even if they knew it existed. They’re gonna make mistakes and they’re gonna win sometimes. And in some ways, I’m glad they’re not wasting their time reading this blog.

The difference between a mere critic and someone who offers useful ideas is the difference between the man in the arena and those “cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” It’s the difference between the academes and the landscapers and the outside sales reps and the guy who started a janitorial service so he could get up at 3 AM to clean your office building toilets.

Ultimately, I’m not interested in being a critic. I mean to show the world that there is a better way to do business, and that means I’ll first have to build a better business. I expect to succeed. But if I fail, I’ll fail having dared to try something great.

 

 

As we prepare for the turkey, college football, and Black Friday deals coming up on this long weekend, I thought it would be good to reflect on what Thanksgiving meant to those who came before us. It just so happens that Thanksgiving Day 2015 will fall on November 26th, just like it did in 1789 when George Washington first issued his proclamation recommending a day of public thanksgiving and prayer.

Like the Americans of George’s day, we have a great deal to be thankful for. So, without further ado: