Beyond Entrepreneurship 2.0 summary

Multiplication. It’s pretty important if you’re an elementary student about to take a math quiz. But it’s even more critical if you’re leading an enterprise. Why? Because a leader’s style has a multiplying effect, one that ripples through the rest of the company.

Of course, effective leadership will look different for every leader and every situation. Gandhi and Churchill are both remembered as iconic leaders though their styles couldn’t have been more different. However, a good leader should embrace at least one of seven essential leadership qualities.

Your employees know what to do and how to do it. But do they know why they’re doing it? If you haven’t defined and shared your vision with your team, your work has no why. A shared vision is critical not just to your success but also to your longevity. Commitment to a shared vision can pull your team through challenges and transitions and guide tough decisions.

So what is vision exactly? Your vision is the future you’d like to see for your company. Formulated correctly, though, it also unifies your team, sets your mission, and informs your strategy.

If someone wins millions in the lottery, it’s pretty fair to say they got lucky. But what if someone has unlikely success in transforming a small enterprise into a multi-million dollar company? Did they get lucky, too? Of course, creating success in business demands strategy, skill, and plenty of hard work. But when it comes to whether an entrepreneurial idea gets off the ground, a product finds its market, or an enterprise successfully scales, luck often plays a big part.

Luck, in the strictest sense of the word, is purely random. It can have seismic consequences for you and your business, and yet you can neither cause nor control it. But you can leverage whatever luck does come your way, whether it's good or bad, to produce great results.

There’s no recipe for entrepreneurial success. But there are certain key ingredients that can make an individual entrepreneur or a fledgling business successful. Ingredients like leadership, vision, and agility. 

Then again, there are plenty of enterprises that possess all these ingredients and still don’t fulfill their potential. The raw materials just don’t come together into a satisfying whole.

Strategic consultants charge big bucks to help enterprises hone their strategy. Why are their rates so eye-wateringly high? Because all kinds of businesspeople, from CEOs to MBA students, have been taught to believe that strategy needs to be complicated to be effective. This couldn’t be further from the truth.

What is strategy? Think back to your company’s mission. Your strategy is the methodology you’ll apply to achieve that mission. And to be effective, this strategy should be streamlined and uncomplicated.

In 1927, H. M. Warner of Warner Brothers movie studio was asked his opinion on the nascent sound technology that would, within years, kill off silent films and usher in the era of talkies. His response? “Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?” 

Plenty of world-changing ideas, from the telephone to the personal computer and talking pictures, were dismissed before they finally came to fruition. It just goes to show you: you can’t innovate or evolve if you don’t first learn how to identify a promising idea and act on its potential.

Establishing and growing a great enterprise is a little bit like writing a great novel. Novelists need to pay a lot of attention to the big picture: plot, structure, character, voice, themes. But at the end of the day, if they want to get their novel out of their head and onto the page, there’s only one way to do it: write. Sentence by sentence, word by word.

Simply put, you need to execute.