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Giving Responsibility vs. Giving Tasks

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How to get people on board

I just finished a whirlwind trip to Ireland, California, Ohio and Virginia. In each of those places I had discussions with business owners around how to get people to take initiative. One thing that came out was that a lot of us think we’re giving people responsibility when we’re really just giving tasks. The results are very different from one to the other.

The Main Difference
When we give people responsibility, they will take ownership.
When we give them a task, they will feel used.

Responsibility Leads to Ownership
The difference matters because giving people ownership creates Stakeholders, while making them feel used creates employees. Too often we give tasks when we think we’re giving responsibility and are inadvertently making people into employees when what we really want are Stakeholders.

The Difference Between a Task and a Responsibility?
Responsibility always includes the ability to make decisions at multiple levels:
1) Am I free to come up with a better way to do it?
2) Can I question the validity of the task altogether (ask why)?
3) Am I responsible to get it done without someone checking up on me?, and others.

Tasks usually involve one decision:
“Am I going to do what they told me, or not?” Someone else has figured out all the other “hard” questions” (especially why). I just need to decide whether I will obey. Pretty much what we expect of a five-year old.

Children are given tasks. Adults are given responsibility. Stakeholders are Adults. Employees are children. Which do you want?

The Participation Age Company – Is Yours?

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Day 13 of 21 days with Chuck’s new book, Why Employees Are ALWAYS a Bad Idea

The Participation Age isn’t futuristic. Companies in all industries have escaped the core business diseases of the Industrial Age to Make Meaning, not just money. And they make a lot more of both. Can you?

A Big That Figured It Out Decades Ago
Some people are pioneers. Bill Gore was just that. In 1958, at the height of the Industrial Age Factory System, he created a company that foretold the Participation Age. It is a magnificent example of a big manufacturing company ($3billion 10,000 employees) that gets it and ignored the Industrial Age altogether. They are named one of the best places to work every year. Following are reasons for their success.

What Is Gore’s Secret Sauce?
Leaders as Servants; No Managers – “Eschewing hierarchy and bosses, W. L. Gore encourages a team-based environment— and there are no executive perks. “At Gore, we don’t manage people,” wrote founder Bill Gore. “We expect people to manage themselves.”

In 1967, Bill Gore described their culture in a paper as a “Lattice Structure”. This wasn’t a paper he wrote; it was a life he lived out through his company. Here are some quotes from that paper that show how W. L. Gore lives as a Participation Age company:

“A lattice organization involves self-commitment and natural leadership, and lacks assigned or assumed authority… It is through these lattice organizations that things get done, and most of us delight in going around the formal procedures and doing things the straight forward and easy way.” Bill Gore

Attributes of the Lattice
• No fixed or assigned authority
• Sponsors (mentors) not bosses
• Natural leadership defined by followership [Not titles]
• Objectives set by those who must make things happen
• Tasks and functions organized through commitments – Each person in the Lattice interacts directly with every other person with no intermediary. [Not through managers]

Leader Different leaders guide associates in different activities. The title “leader” is earned only by gaining followers. No managers.

Sponsors [mentor newer associates]
• Engage in a one-on-one relationship
• Focus on the development and growth of the associate

Work Teams and Leadership
Leadership evolves based on knowledge, skill, experience or capability in the particular activity in which a team is involved. Leaders are associates who have developed followers. Teams or groups formulate their own plans of action rather than having them dictated to them. Each associate self-commits to projects or responsibilities.

Communications – Direct, Not Through Managers
There is no hierarchy of communication, no need to go through one associate to reach another. Associates are free to go directly to whomever they believe has an answer.

Salaries Set By Peers
Associates rank each other twice a year on contribution to the success of the enterprise, and functional teams assign pay according to the rankings.

A Traditional Manufacturer Escapes the Industrial Age
Semco has 3,000 employees and makes things like washing machines, meat slicers, and heavy industrial machinery. They practice everything W. L. Gore practices, and more. The message here is if the most traditional of manufacturing companies can escape the Industrial Age, it leaves the rest of us without an excuse.

At Semco, the two ruling assumptions are the opposite of Fredrick Taylor’s two “stupid and lazy” assumptions:

– “trust in adult behavior” — assume that the basic human drive is to be productive, to build something lasting, and to contribute to something bigger than themselves, and

– as adults, every person’s rhythm is different when it comes to when, where, and how they do their best work.

Some of the practical out workings of these two ruling assumption:

1) No HR department – the leaders at Semco do not abdicate their responsibility to the Stakeholders so they could focus on operations and making more money in the short term. They see operations and people in an integrated way, and not a function to be segmented out to HR professionals.

2) No policy documents – none anywhere in the company. Adults will figure out together what matters.

3) No headquarters – There are various facilities in many locations. None of them reports to a flagpole at some “most important” location.

4) Six or more leaders take on the function of “CEO” – and pass it around every six months

5) No job titles – everyone is just an associate – no senior, junior or part-time labels.

6) Stakeholders all decide their own working hours, including all manufacturing associates, and find teams of people to work with that share those life rhythms. Ricardo Semler says, “We want people to work on a structure of their own,” says Semler. “The day that we measured people by time clocked is long gone. We don’t want to know when or how you’re working, but only if you’re fulfilling your commitment.”

7) All 3,000+ regularly receive the company’s financial statements – There are classes to help them understand how to make senses of them.

8) Each small team is fully self-governing and has to figure out how to best contribute to the larger picture at Semco. You can be voted out of Semco every six months by the people who work with you. In my opinion, this is one of the key reasons Semco’s model works – no one can brown-nose or BS their way to safety. W. L. Gore uses this same model.

9) All meetings are voluntary and the first two people there become “board members” with a bigger say during the meeting.

10) The responsibility for reviewing and setting targets falls squarely on every employee for themselves – No one else sets their targets or reviews them.
As you can see, there is a remarkable level of independence, inter-dependence and responsibility placed on each person. People can even start their own businesses using company resources, and many have.

Others Are Already Doing It
We have mentioned many times that size, age of company or type of industry has no bearing on whether a company can escape the Industrial Age and become a Participation Age company. The above are only two examples. We have found dozens of companies in almost any industry and all sizes that are building Participation Age companies in which the hallmark of the company is “sharing”, including TD Industries, Whole Foods, Wegmans, Zappos, 37Signals, Trader Joes, Container Store, Stonyfield Yogurt and hundreds of others.

Making It Work For You
Building a post-Industrial front office isn’t easy, but it isn’t complex either. If you love the idea of building a company that will last for generations and leave a fabulous legacy, this process will be a joy for you, even if you still find it hard. This is not a size-based model, it’s the model that companies of any size who want escape the gravitational pull of the Industrial Age will have to employ in order to be successful in the 21st century.

As the Industrial Age fades and the Participation Age grows, there are more Stakeholders than ever out there looking for you, just as much as you are looking for them. For the next decade you will do a lot of weeding out of “employees”. But more and more you will find people coming in prepared to be Stakeholders who will hit the ground running with you to build a lasting business with a great legacy.

This is a summary of a chapter from Chuck’s new book, “Why Employees Are ALWAYS a Bad Idea (And Other Business Diseases of the Industrial Age)”. Click here to pre-order this new ground breaking book at a discount on IndieGoGo.com until July 28.

Why Employees are Always a Bad Idea

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Day 5 of 21 days with Chuck’s new book, Why Employees Are ALWAYS a Bad Idea

This Industrial Age concept was never a good idea for companies, and was worse for the “employees”. Today, companies that move forward without employees will thrive. Those that don’t will fall behind.

Children or Adults
The Industrial Age gave us cool toys and a cushy life, but it also came with some Business Diseases. One of the most rabid of the Business Diseases is the concept of an employee, which is a very new idea in the history of man, and one that needs to go away.

When machines took over most production, they couldn’t run themselves, and so the Industrial Age re-created people in the image of machines in order to run them.

Employees are “Silent”

Over time companies made it clear they only wanted the productive part of the person to show up. They required people to leave the human being (the messy part) at home. As a result, the generation which entered the work force at the very peak of the Industrial Age (1945-1960-ish) was given the worst generational label ever – The Silent Generation. If you had a “Silent” as a parent, you learned to live life the way they had been taught – “Be loyal to the company. Do what you’re told. Show up early, leave late. Shut up, sit down, don’t make waves, live invisibly, go out quietly. The company will take care of you.”

Employees are Children
This view of work (and life) turned adults back into children. You were taught that the most mature person was one who obediently took orders, did what they were told, didn’t question authority, was blindly loyal to those in charge, and lived passively as others directed their lives. Pretty much what we want a four year old to do.

In order to keep the children from ruining the house, and to make them extensions of machines, the Industrial Age required they come to the office Day Care Center every day, boxed them in with extremely clear and narrow limitations on what they could do, the hours in which they could do them, and endless limitations on being human and “adult” at work. It stripped them of their need to think, create and solve because the machine didn’t need them to think, create and solve. It just needed them to do.

Employees Are a Disease, not a Cure
We reject the business culture of the Industrial Age as a bad idea that needs to be corrected. Employees are one of those Business Diseases that should be eradicated. Because of the Industrial Age, the word “employee” has become synonymous with “child”. We can’t even use the word anymore. We don’t want to hire children who need to be told what to do and managed closely so they don’t run into the street.

Employees are Replaced by Stakeholders

In the Participation Age, we don’t hire employees, but have replaced them with Stakeholders. Our Stakeholders are sold out to living well by doing good, and are not employees who punch clocks. Stakeholders are first and foremost adults who can think, take initiative and make decisions, carry responsibility, take ownership, be creative and solve problems.

Stakeholders are Adults

Our Stakeholders are all adults. “Employee” is a four-letter word for us. Adults don’t need someone to keep them from running into the streets or ruining the carpets. Adults ask questions. They don’t live passively but are self-directed, creative, and solve problems. They don’t shut up; they make waves, they are highly visible and they don’t expect the company or other adults to take care of them. Adults own stuff, and they own their work as a natural part of being an adult. And the whole messy person comes to work, not just the extension of the machine.

Stakeholders Require Leadership, Not Adult Supervision
If you hire Stakeholders (adults) instead of employees (children), it changes the way you direct people. We don’t have office hours, vacation time or personal days. We’re not interested in whose car was in the parking lot first or who left last. We believe office politics is a waste of time, so no one will ever be promoted.

Stakeholders Focus on Work, Not Promotion to the Next Title

Every adult who works with us (over 20 full and part-time and growing) has a title that includes the word Chief; Chief Results Officer, Chief Connecting Officer, Chief Transformation Officer, Chief Operations Officer, Chief Development Officer, Chief of MIH (Making it Happen).

We don’t have supervisors or managers or directors or VPs – just Chiefs. None of us will ever need to be promoted, we’re already all at the top. We’ll just grow into more responsibilities as we become better at things. As we do them, they will be recognized and somebody might change our title (there is no centralized title giver).

Stakeholders Create Better Teams
We believe in working together as Committed Community (adults live in community) to get results for each other and for other business owners. Every full-time Stakeholder will take part in profit-sharing. Why wouldn’t they? They’re all adults who own their work, they should own profits from their work as well. That’s what adults do.

Stakeholders are Self-Motivated and Self-Managed
Although we lease 1,500sf of office space for training and rent other spaces around the city, none of us have an office there – we all work from our homes and places like breakfast joints and coffee shops. If it helps somebody to get things done better, we’ll get them an office.

Stakeholders Make You and Themselves More Money
Our business grew 61% in 2010, 41% in 2011, 66% in 2012 and projected at 150% in 2013. Why? Because every Stakeholder is an adult, taking responsibility, creating, problem solving, making it happen, and taking ownership of whatever needs to be done to bring our clients the best experience and the most tangible results possible. And everyone is a lot happier because they all work with adults who pull their own weight.

Employees are a alway bad idea. Stakeholders will replace them.

This is a summary of a chapter from Chuck’s new book, “Why Employees Are ALWAYS a Bad Idea (And Other Business Diseases of the Industrial Age)”. Click here to pre-order this new ground breaking book at a discount on IndieGoGo.com until July 28.

Manage Stuff. Lead People.

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The end of management.

Management is good. Managers are bad. There is no room for them in a Participation Age business. People don’t need to be managed; they need to be led. The difference is not semantic, it is gigantic.

The Industrialists did their dead level best to re-make people into simple extensions of machines. When people are extensions of machines, they are “stuff” to be managed. But if they are fully human, they require leadership, not management.

In our business, we only manage stuff; processes, systems, delivery of goods and services, accounting, marketing, sales, etc. These are all “things” to be managed. Everyone in the business manages stuff of some sort or another. But none of us needs someone with the title of “manager” to hover over us to ensure the stuff will get managed.

Manage Stuff
Stuff definitely needs to be managed. Unlike people, stuff is inherently stupid and lazy. It needs to be told what to do; it doesn’t have a brain of its own or any motivation to assemble itself. The packaging material and the product just sit on the counter until someone picks both of them up and puts them in the box. Someone who is smarter and more motivated than the stuff needs to manage that process, but the smart and motivated person doing the packing does not need managing – they need to be led.

Accounting numbers are also stupid and lazy. They just sit on spreadsheets until a smart and motivated person comes along to update, organize and report on them. That process needs to be managed, but not the person doing the accounting – they need to be led.

Every process, system, product, and service in a business is inherently stupid and lazy and needs to be managed. Unfortunately, managers don’t see much difference between the people, and the stuff or processes in the business. To a manager, people are extensions of machines or processes, and both of them need the hovering involvement of a third party to force them to work. That other person, called “manager”, doesn’t actually pack the box.

The manager assumes the person is as inert as the packing materials, and must be “managed” to ensure they will actually pick up the packing materials and put them in the box. The manager exists to ensure the person doesn’t just sit there like the packing materials. It’s a waste of two good lives; the life of the manager who does nothing, and the packer, who is treated like a nine-year old incapable of being responsible.

Lead People
A leader will do it quite differently. They will not hover over or manage the adult Stakeholders. They will impart vision and guidance, including why we do what we do, metrics for success and metrics for exceeding the objective. A leader will train and provide the necessary infrastructure, and they will create a process that requires the packing person or the process itself to proactively report to the leader regularly how things are going.

Then the leader will do something extraordinary that the manager would rarely do – they will GO AWAY AND BE PRODUCTIVE, TOO. Instead of hovering over the children in the day care center, they will go somewhere and do something themselves that adds to the bottom line. Or they might just be one of the packers or one of the accountants, and join right in being productive; leading and motivating by example, not by threat, persuasion, cajoling or hovering.

A manager justifies their existence by making other people productive more than by being productive themselves. Managers “feel” productive – they have tons of monitoring on their plate. But a leader will lead by example, get in the trenches and be one of the productive people.

Leaders can afford to do this because they hire Stakeholders, not employees, and don’t need to live in a day care center where they are watched like nine year olds. Most of the work of the manager disappears or gets dispersed among all the adult Stakeholders.

Everyone is a Leader
Stakeholders are adult leaders, too, and understand that if they have all the training and equipment they need, and clearly understand the objective required, they will gladly take the bull by the horns and “own” their tasks, job, process and result. Why? Because they also know they own part of the compensation (profit-sharing) that will come from that level of ownership. Taking on the former tasks of the manager is one more way for them to Make Meaning, not just money.

Adults Without Managers – An Old Idea
The idea of managing stuff but leading people is not a new concept. A store owner prior to the Industrial Age hired someone else to stock shelves, trained them and gave them the tools they needed to do it. Then that leader went back to being productive themselves. If the stocker wasn’t productive, they were let go and the leader got someone who could self-manage. After training the new person, the leader went back to being productive again. Managers hang on to employees who need to be managed because it justifies their existence. A leader fires them and finds a Stakeholder.

In a great modern business, as before the Industrial Age, everyone produces something, whether it is maintenance, accounting, packing, new product development, or vision and leadership. No one stagnates around watching other people do the work. Stakeholders are all leaders, and all of the manage stuff.

Fire All The Managers – All of Them (Including Yourself)
You can replace five or ten managers with one leader, easily. It’s a great money saver and you’ll find out real fast who are the chidren (employees) who need to be moved along, and who are your adult Stakeholders who will take over the very few things the manager was doing that were of any value.

Keep Only The Stakeholders
Are you managing employees/children? If you are, my guess is you’re really tired of it. Stop it. Tell the nine-year olds it’s time to grow up and be adult Stakeholders. Show them the stuff that needs to be managed, then tell them everyone is responsible to lead in their area of expertise. Then go get a job and be productive yourself. If you have employees who don’t want to grow up and at least lead themselves, find someone who will. There are plenty of Stakeholders out there.

Managers – A Business Disease of the Industrial Age
Managing people (not stuff) is a disease of the Industrial Age. It’s a recently invented construct and is a dead end process that maintains people at the nine year old level. And it dehumanizes them as if they were an extension of a stupid and lazy machine.

Leaders – What People Have Always Needed
Leading has been around since the dawn of man. It was not invented, and is the time proven method for motivating people. Everyone in your business should do it in their area of expertise. It’s rewarding and humanizing.

Get out of the Industrial Age into the Participation Age. Manage stuff. Lead people.

Yahoo’s CEO Marissa Mayer Is Officially An Industrialist

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Home Alone.

After I wrote my last post on why working 9-5 is a bad idea, I found out Yahoo’s CEO Mayer was killing telecommuting. It’s a classic failure of leadership and will get her the opposite result than she hopes.

This last week, Marissa Mayer ended telecommuting for all Yahoo employees. The few retro voices in the archaic wilderness trumpeting this move as “good”, say it will make Yahoo more “innovative” and “collaborative”. Uh…cubes. They’re being stuffed back into cubes.

More Productive?…No.
This definitely won’t make them more productive. All the data old and new confirms this. Until after 1850, the majority of all manufacturing and other productivity was done at home. Salary.com research shows people waste an average of 25% of their day in the office doing nothing. Other research shows that people in an office waste up to 50% of their time “managing up” (brown nosing). Telecommuting is proven to increase productivity.

More Innovative and Collaborative?…No.
And there is no data that suggests that putting people back in cubes makes them more innovative or collaborative. Mayer’s decision was lazy and lacked any innovation on her own part. There are a hundred better ways to make sure telecommuters are touching base in an innovative and collaborative way with each other and the company, but that would have taken some energy to figure out. Reintroducing the brass steam whistle and the time clock was much easier, but is a short-sighted decision.

Yahoo Employees Are Now Stupid and Lazy
But the worst reason for doing this is that it reinforces the traditional understanding of the “employee”. In 1903, Frederick Winslow Taylor wrote his views of work that became the foundation for Scientific Management theory, which governs our view of work today. He said there are two basic assumptions you must make about employees, 1) they are lazy (he called it soldiering – doing as little as possible to keep from being fired), and 2) they are stupid “the average employee is so stupid that they more nearly resemble the ox than any other type.”

If employees are stupid and lazy (a view not common until well after the 1850s and convenient for Industrialists to believe as they treated them like indentured servants), than you need smart and motivated people to manage them – thus the modern separation between “employees” (stupid and lazy), and “management” (smart and motivated).

Mayer Is An Industrialist
Mayer’s move is a confirmation that she is a modern Industrialist (click to see my post defining this), and believes her people are definitely lazy, and almost certainly stupid (can’t figure out how to be productive on their own). But the problem isn’t with her employees; it’s with her leadership. Great leaders inspire and motivate people to be owners or “Stakeholders”; self-managed and proactive adults who take ownership of their jobs and the company’s future, and are consistently creative and innovative, always working to make the whole “system” better.

Mayer lacks leadership. She can’t inspire and motivate adults, so she has gone to the fetal position of Industrialism, requiring that all the stupid and lazy children now check themselves into the day care center that is the office so that managers can keep them from running into the street or messing on the carpets.

The Opposite Result
Yahoo needs engaged Stakeholders – adults who can work with her to pull Yahoo out of the morass. Instead she is creating employees – children who will be managed and told what to do. Innovative and collaborative, my eye.

A classic failure of leadership, made worse because her actions blame the Stakeholders for her own lack of vision. This is nothing more than calling all the elephants to the graveyard for Yahoo’s last rites.

How to Stop Managing & Be Productive Instead

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Toddlers, teens or adults?

We’ve already said WHY Management Is a Bad Idea. Here we identify HOW to stop managing so you and everyone else is more productive.

The art of leadership is to know how few times the leader should actually make the decision.

Managers make decisions. Leaders get others to do it as often as they can because none of us is as smart as all of us.

We could virtually do away with managers if they would just lead instead. I believe we could replace at least every five managers with one leader, and possibly ten to one in many businesses. 15 of the top 20 reasons people leave their job involves middle managers. Think how much more profitable (and fun) it would be to eliminate middle management all together.

Modern management is traced back to Frederick Winslow Taylor’s Scientific Management Principle from 1903 and 1911, that assumes employees are a) stupid and b) lazy, and therefore we need smart and motivated people to manage the stupid and lazy ones. In a good business you don’t need managers because the leader doesn’t believe people are stupid and lazy.

Leaders get out of the way. Here’s how to move from managing to leading. As you are having a conversation with a Stakeholder, ask yourself these questions, which move from Problem through Question to Solution:

Chasing Three Years Olds Around the Store – Did I have to come find out they had a PROBLEM? That’s the lowest level of management – running around finding out other people’s problems. If you do that, you have a bunch of toddlers working for you, and you’re the one who made them that way by chasing them around. Stop it.

Managing Eight Year Olds – Did they come find me with a PROBLEM? Not much better. Children come whining to their parents that Johnny hit them. You’ve trained them to do it. Stop it.

Managing 13 Year Olds – Did I have to figure out the right QUESTION? Asking the right question is 90% of getting the right answer. Anybody can identify problems, but if they aren’t asking the right questions to fix them, they aren’t adding much value. If you have to form the right questions, you’re not leading, you’re managing. Stop it and get others to form the questions.

Manager High Schoolers – Did they bring me the right QUESTION with no solution? You’ve taught others to not think; you’re the only one bright enough to solve things. Require that they come up with solutions.

Managing College Kids – Did they bring some possible SOLUTIONS for me to pick from? We’re getting there, but still you’ve taught them to not take risks and actually solve things. They’re afraid to fix things because you’ve taught them only you can do it, because you’re more experienced and less likely to do something stupid. You forget that you had to make mistakes. If you are ever going to have someone else in your business that can lighten the load, they need to take risks and make mistakes, too. Stop being a control freak and teach others to lead by letting them solve problems WITHOUT YOU.

Managing Adults – Did they bring me a report on how they SOLVED something? Guess what, you’re a leader. You can now focus on the business of building a great business instead of creating stupid and lazy people by all your managing.

Moving From Manager to Leader
You should be asking these questions every time you talk to someone, with the objective of getting to “Managing Adults” as quickly as possible (might take a year or more, depending on how long you’ve been chasing the toddlers).

If you want to run a day care center, it’s your option. People aren’t stupid and lazy and they aren’t children. You make them that way by managing them. Stop it. And if some of them decide to not grow up, kick them out of the house and get others who will be adults. You’ll all have a lot more fun, and make a lot more money – with no managers.

You should lead no matter what the size of your business.

Leaders are reactive, not proactive.

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Number of Buns Sold…

The objective of every business owner should be to do as little managing and as much leading as possible. We think good leaders should be highly proactive. In some ways that shows they aren’t really leaders, but managers. What’s the difference?

Leading vs. Managing
In short, managers are proactive, and great leaders are, in some very important ways, reactive.

Managers take the responsibility to go out on the shop floor with a clipboard and watch what everyone is doing, count the productivity cycles, carefully measure the waste, write it all on the clipboard, transfer it to a highly detailed spreadsheet, analyze it all, and come up with ways to improve the whole process.

That’s great management, but questionable leadership.

Number of Buns Sold
A leader does it quite differently. The founder of Wendy’s hamburgers, Dave Thomas, didn’t do any of that. Instead he was given one number every day to react to – number of buns sold. From the one number he could tell how many hamburgers, chicken sandwiches, french fries, Frosties, and soft drinks had been sold that day, and what the profits per bun were. Dave Thomas did not go looking for any of this – it all came and found him, and all he had to do was react to it.

I’m sure Dave Thomas was very involved in setting up the systems and metrics that would get him his bun number every day. But from then on all he had to do was react. The responsibility for all the clip board stuff and for getting him the report was all on someone else’s plate. That allowed Dave to focus on the strategic parts of his business.

Great leaders set up environments where all the important things come and find them. Managers put themselves right in the middle of the process.

If you are a business owner you need to figure out how to stop managing and start leading, and you need to start doing it as early in your business as you can. That’s going to be hard for the control freaks, or those who find their self-worth in being indispensable, or those who have trained their clients to think they have to work directly with the owner, or – etc.

Distributive Management
Think of work as laser beams. A leader’s job is to carry a mirror and deflect as many of those beams to someone else as possible. To do this, it’s not as simple as just assigning it to the next guy. It might take a lot of proactive work to set up the process, system, or report to make sure that the information will come find you going forward.

Successful business owners learn to lead as quickly as possible, and are constantly figuring out how they can get others to do the things they are doing. They are extremely proactive in figuring out how to get the business to come find them, instead of having to go get involved.

Business owners who stay on the treadmill are heavily involved in every detail, think that being responsible is having the company revolve around them, and they take being endlessly “proactive” as a badge of honor.

What is your “number of buns sold”, and how do you set up your business to feed those few important things to you? When you figure out how to stop managing and start leading you’ll have a better business and a lot more time to focus on the strategic development of your business. And that will make running a business a lot more fun.

Be very proactive in setting up a business to which you can be highly reactive. That’s the difference between a manager and a leader.

Risk what I risk, not what I say.

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Grab the flag. Lead the charge.

Recently a client and good friend said, “I would be willing to bet a smart guy like you with a lot of success in your past wasn’t in danger of losing your house when you started your business, even if it had failed.” She’s wrong, but she’s not at all alone in believing that. Why?

Does anybody lead by example anymore?

For years I’ve ranted about going all in, burning the bridges, sinking the ships, shredding the parachutes, being willing to lose it all to be successful. I’ve shared all the research I can find on this, and my own experience in five businesses of waking up at 3am in cold sweats wondering if we would make it.

Yet it’s still hard for people to believe that I actually lived at risk in any of these businesses. For some of them I didn’t, but for the ones that were most successful (including this one) I was at the most risk. That correlation between success and risk is not surprising to me, because when we don’t have a back door, we are more likely to be successful. Survival is a very strong instinct.

Risk and commitment go hand in hand and are fundamental to success.

So why don’t people believe me? I’d love your thoughts. My own two cents:

  1. We have apparently lost most if not all connections between what leaders say you should do and what they themselves actually do. We’re indoctrinated with the academic model where information goes from head to head, not life to life. The professor spews info and goes home.
  2. The “training” and “success” industries follow the academic model. I know a number of trainers who were hired to learn to impart tools and tactics for how to live life who never did any of what they taught. And I know success trainers who have never been successful. In many if not most cases, it’s not even expected.
  3. We’ve gotten use to separating the private and public lives of actors, politicians, big business CEOs and others as if who we are in public is magically different than who we are in private.
  4. “Experts” and “Gurus” have created images of themselves that are nearly messiah-like, where they can’t be seen to ever struggle or do dumb things. So they spout the “miracles”, “secrets”, and “5 easy steps” they used to make life so easy that they have no problems any more. We actually believe these people don’t struggle (they make more money when we believe that).

I struggle. I have bad days. I have to work at seeing everything as “fascinating!”. And I risked everything in a number of businesses when I truly believed it was worth doing. I’m not an expert, or a guru, and I’m not smart, I’m just relentless. It’s how successful business owners build businesses.