Category Archives: Entrepreneurship

If you find yourself in a big company, you can still be "intrapreneurial" — a term that refers to entrepreneurial activities in an otherwise non-entrepreneurial environment. Here are 10 Commandments of the Intrapreneur:

1. Come to work each day willing to be fired.

2. Circumvent any orders aimed at stopping your dream.

3. Do any job needed to make your project work, regardless of your job description. (BC: Or, as Eric Reis puts it: "In any situation it is your responsibility, using your best judgment, to do what you think is in the best interests of the company. That's it. Everything else [in your job description] is only marketing.")

4. Find people to help you.

5. Follow your intuition about the people you choose, and work only with the best.

6. Work underground as long as you can – publicity triggers the corporate immune mechanism.

7. Never bet on a race unless you are running in it.

8. Remember it is easier to ask for forgiveness than for permission.

9. Be true to your goals, but be realistic about the ways to achieve them.

10. Honor your sponsors.

A gentler version is here, both I think are attributed to Gifford Pinchot.

A McDonald's executive, participating in the always-fascinating IamA series on Reddit, writes:

Our customers want mediocre food cheap. Every time we release a higher priced but higher quality product, the people who said they would pay for it… never do.

You say you want more fruits, salads, organic, all natural, etc. well then start buying that stuff and stop buying double cheeseburgers. Our best selling stuff is always whatever we can make taste good, at rock bottom prices.

We've actually learned not to listen to our customers when it comes to a lot of things. Health nuts won't come into McDonald's to eat even when we give them what they want.

As entrepreneurs we cannot blindly listen to our customers. They lie to us. Here's my old post titled Listening to Customers is Harder Than it Seems.

Given that customers lie, sometimes we have to extract information indirectly. Instead of asking customers how much they would pay for a hypothetical product, ask them how much they're currently paying for however it is they're solving the problem that you are trying to solve.

Other times, it can work to ask a direct question but discount the words that come out of their mouth and pay attention to body language. It would be fun to come up with a list of questions that elicit non-useful verbal answers but useful body language answers. In the past I've proposed, "Do you have self-confidence?" Steve Jobs asks employees, "Why are you here?"

Finally, actions speak louder than words. Just as your calendar never lies — how you spend your time says more about your priorities than your stated priorities — what customers actually buy and do is more instructive than what they say they'll do.

David Kelley has a great piece up on The Atlas Society site entitled Life: Your Adventure in Entrepreneurship. You don't have to be an Objectivist or Randian to appreciate it. He discusses the spirit of entrepreneurship and how it applies in all parts of life. Here's the opening graf:

The entrepreneurial spirit is the spirit of enterprise: ambition to succeed, initiative in taking action, alertness to opportunity. It means being proactive rather than reacting to events and opportunities as they come along. It involves a full acceptance of the responsibility for initiating action to achieve one's goals, and for dealing with the consequences that arise as one does so.

I liked this bit on self-ownership:

Not all of us own the businesses we work for. But all of us are self-owners. The concept of self-ownership is a partly metaphorical way of capturing the fact that individuals are ends in themselves. That fact is easier to state in the abstract than it is to embody in the concrete, in one's actual outlook and practice. The sense of self-ownership manifests itself in the kind of total autonomy that leads us to say of someone: "He is his own man." It involves a commitment to one's own happiness as a true end-in-itself—not something one has to apologize for pursuing, not something that one may enjoy only on condition that it serves some other end. It involves the ability to experience happiness without any tendril of guilt at having succeeded. It involves a sense that the only person one answers to, ultimately, is oneself.

Read the whole thing.

Thanks to DaveJ for sending, who also sent me this worthwhile piece on the Myth of Crowdsourcing.

Jim Logan says that the most important number to focus on in a business plan is the nearest revenue number the company lists. Typically this is the Year 1 revenue projection. Hone in on that number (ignore all the others, I'd say) and ask the following questions to make sure the entrepreneur knows how s/he's going to hit their first revenue forecast. If they don't know how they're going to hit the first number, how will they hit any of the others?

• What is the profile of the person you’ll primarily be contacting?
• Who influences the person in their position?
• What does this person value or fear in their job?
• What are the steps to your target account’s typical purchase cycle?  How do they make decisions?
• What are your sales steps?
• What is your anticipated sales cycle?
• What is the expected time for each of your sales steps?  Did you factor in time for making contact, scheduling, negotiating, etc.?
• What is the expected value of your average transaction?
• What is your expected close ratio?
• What is your expected time to revenue?
• What is your expected time to cash?
• How many prospective accounts do you expect to have to engage with each month to meet your revenue forecast?
• How are you going to find these prospects?
• How are you going to contact them?  What means?
• What lead generation activities do you have planned?
• What sales tools do you have?
• What sales forecasting and review process do you have in place?
• How accurate were you past forecasts?  Did they adjust much weekly and monthly? (a really bad sign)
• What is the skill-set and number of sales people you must have to reach your revenue forecast?
• How will the first customers weigh on the organization’s ability to continue to sell?
• What are your booking and revenue recognition policies?

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Here are 50 side businesses you can start on your own. Here are 10 outstanding lessons from a failed start-up. Here's the founder of And1 talking about how he built his company.

Joseph Priestly, the 18th century theologian, philosopher, and inventor, embraced three concepts I've written about at length:

• He exposed himself to randomness: try more stuff than the next guy; law of large numbers; insight at the intersection of seemingly unrelated ideas.
• He maintained side projects: hedge bets; humility around being able to predict which particular project will be the big win; stay intellectually stimulated.
• He experimented and iterated: many little bets over few big bets; learn by doing; adapt rapidly to changing conditions.

Priestly was never one for the grand hypothesis; he rarely designed experiments specifically to test a general theory….His approach was far more inventive, even chaotic. While the experiments themselves were artfully designed, his higher-level plan for working through a sequence of experiments was less rigorous, Priestly’s mode was to get interested in a problem – conductivity, fire, air – and throw the kitchen sink at it. (Literally so, in that many of his experiments were conducted in the kitchen sink.) The method was closer to that of natural selection than abstract reasoning: new ideas came out of new juxtapositions, randomness, diversity. Priestly would later credit the emerging technology of the period – air pumps and electrostatic machines – with helping him develop his distinctive approach: “By the help of these machines,” he wrote, “we are able to put an endless variety of things into an endless variety of situations, while nature herself is the agent that shows the result.

That's from Steven Johnson's book, as dog-eared by Russell Davies.