dispatches from TJICistan

Best business blogging I have read this month:

http://foundread.com/2007/06/06/outcomes…

I am embarrassed to say that it took me 10 years to learn one of the most fundamental pillars of leadership: It is all about outcomes - and not activities. This business truth is simple and obvious, yet, extraordinarily powerful. Unfortunately, it remains strangely elusive for many founders, and most people…

most people tend to confuse activity with outcomes – and it is a breathtakingly expensive mistake. In a world of infinite choices, choosing which activities will occupy your day is likely to be your single greatest driver of effectiveness. Beyond picking the right objectives to pursue, you need to focus on the results, not just the means to that end.

Some people choose wisely and focus on high-impact activities that truly move the needle. Others, however, work the same number of hours without making clear progress toward measurable results. Focusing on what really matters is a difficult-to-achieve skill in our “attention deficit disorder” world. Successful leaders – and, therefore, successful founders – invest the time to clearly identify, prioritize, and communicate key goals. They then measure their success by real progress against those desired outcomes.

(a) He’s dead-on, 100% right.

(b) Nothing teaches you this lesson like experience. Or, at least, it’s the only thing that really drove the lesson deep into my bones.

(c) The fact that I am running a profitable business is proof that I am better than 95% of people at this.

(d) The fact that I run a relatively small piddly business is proof that I am worse than 5% of people overall (and 95% of business owners) at this [ note: this is not saying that business owners predominate in the top 5% - I imagine that they're a minority there, outnumbered by successful salesmen, paper-writing academics, real estate agents, professional sports athletes and others...it's just my belief that a business owner must be in the top 5% of effectiveness, or he/she will shortly no longer be a business owner).

(e) I need to drastically improve: there are a few management and marketing tasks that I've been putting off for a month or more, because it's more fun to code and do other things ... and yet, the four or five days of work that I see in these tasks have more potential return than most of what I've been doing for the last month. Gah! Must. Improve.

I learned this valuable lesson when I founded my first start-up, Military.com. In late 1999, we raised a good deal of venture capital, hired rapidly, and set to work at building the definitive portal for the 30 million members of the military community. In just a few short months, we had over 50 employees and were working non-stop on product development, marketing, hiring, brand strategy, user-testing, public relations - all the things a "dot-com darling" was supposed to do. The activity level could not have been higher.

As many of you know, the world came crashing down in the spring of 2000 when the bubble burst. The next two years were exceedingly difficult - layoffs, hurt feelings, and an overwhelming sense of foreboding that we would likely lose the company. In 2002, we were down to just four weeks of cash and about ten employees.

Four weeks of cash?

Ten employees?

Ha! If that's the cut off, then I guess I'm playing in the big leagues.

Time to print up the "I founded a .com and all I got was this lousy t-shirt (and 92,000 shares of stock)" casual wear, I guess.

[ Lest anyone misread the previous sentence and think that the number of shares is some form of bragging, recall that share count is entirely arbitrary (and doubly so when there's just a single stock holder). I originally incorporated the firm with 100 shares, I think, and then for various reasons I needed to split the shares, and an attorney pointed out that in Massachusetts, it costs $100 to amend the corporate resolution to increase the share count, no matter whether you add 100 authorized shares, or 5000, or 100,000. So, I ballooned the authorized shares up to a large number, and then recorded a 1:92 split on the books.

Revenues, assets, ownership, and my (at the time) complete and total lack of a salary remained unchanged. ]

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 8th, 2008 at 9:09 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.