A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all ‘If the Shoe Fits’ posts here

How did John Landgraf, president and general manager of FX Networks, turn the channel from an also-ran to top ratings earner?

Not the way you might think; not by his vision or impeccable taste; not by having his finger on the pulse of the public or because he can see around corners.

He did it by not doing it.

Landgraf spent time on the creative side and when pitching/producing he kept hearing the same thing.

“I always got the same dumb note from the networks. ‘Can you make the character more likable?’ ” he recalled last week in a phone interview. “Not make them more exciting, more compelling, more interesting, no, it was always make them more likable.”

When he got the FX catbird seat he didn’t ask for ‘nicer’ he asked for solid stories.

In other words, he did it by letting go of the power to make those decisions.

“We write a check to fund the production and they send us the shows. By trusting the people you work with — sharing the authority — and being willing to fail, things have gone pretty well for us.”

This is something that every entrepreneur needs to learn.

Success comes not from having the power to make decisions, but from the ability to give that power to others.

 “Power is only of value if you give it away. You have to be willing to give it away, to entrust your career, your reputation and your future to others, to make something that is remarkable.”

Image credit: HikingArtist

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here.

Last week KG Charles-Harris provided an overview of Vator Splash; today he asks questions critical to every entrepreneurs success and sanity.

Am I becoming jaded?  Is there something I’m missing at conferences that others experience?

I recently attended Vator Splash in San Francisco, and unfortunately it was a disappointment.  Yet another startup conference where some high-powered, successful speaker repeats the “5 Steps To Success” or some other topic addressed in a very superficial or trite manner.

There is never serious discussion around failure or how to deal with it.

I made an informal survey at the conference by asking two questions of most people I met:

“Have you maxed out your credit cards to fund your startup?”

“Have you received VC or Angel financing that has enabled you to get rid of your debt?”

Being a social guy, I made the rounds and spoke to a lot of people.  Almost every entrepreneur I met had incurred significant debt to form the venture.  And almost no one had received VC or Angel funding.

This aligns with the huge number of fellow entrepreneurs I have gotten to know over the years.  Most have sacrificed greatly to see an idea or venture born.

Unfortunately I have never attended a conference that speaks to this topic – how does an entrepreneur get to the next step.

Most of these conferences seem to have a specific business model, i.e.,

• pick a successful entrepreneur as main speaker (usually a Stanford, Harvard or MIT graduate);
• present VC or Angel financing as the primary path to success;
• target people who didn’t attend any of the above mentioned institutions and make them believe that they can attain the same networks and capital as graduates from these institutions.

They sell the dream of VC funding without providing actual advice on how to

• penetrate the networks (let alone provide introductions);
• manage rejection;
• know when to give up before losing it all;
• manage personal finances, etc.

How useful are these conferences?  Where can the masses of entrepreneurs who don’t fit the golden mold receive practical advice?

We need more than these events offer – we need something that helps us create success and assists us when dealing with failure.

KG Charles-Harris is CEO of Emanio and a special contributor to MAPping Company Success.

It’s spring, although you wouldn’t know it here in the Pacific Northwest, but most parts of the country seem luckier. Spring is considered a time of new beginnings, which are especially noticeable in the garden. But, actually, spring is any time you want; new beginnings are a state of mind.

Maria Robinson didn’t believe in new beginnings, “Nobody can go back and start a new beginning, but anyone can start today and make a new ending.”

Centuries before Maria shared her insight the Roman philosopher Seneca said something similar, “Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.”

W. Clement Stone provides a concise explanation of what prevents new beginnings, “So many fail because they don’t get started – they don’t go. They don’t overcome inertia. They don’t begin.”

Theodore Roosevelt tells us to just get on with it, “Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.”

The always savvy Anonymous reminds us, “Yesterday’s failures are today’s seeds that must be diligently planted to be able to abundantly harvest tomorrow’s success.”

G.R.Blair offers some wise words to keep your new beginnings on track, “Long-term planning is not about making long-term decisions, it is about understanding the future consequences of today’s decisions.”

But it is the brilliant Mary Shelley who serves up the five words you should repeat every morning when you wake, “The beginning is always today.”

Flickr image credit: foxtongue

A link at SF Gate led me to When You Should Quit Being An Entrepreneur at Business Insider. It’s one of those articles with an interesting premise written by someone with no authority on the subject and little real-world experience. This was mentioned in the comments, which have more value than the article.

The most glaring misstatement was that shutting down your startup equaled failure.

Admitting that you are riding a dead horse does not equal failure.

It’s also stupid to say that a startup fails if it does anything other than go public.

Based on that Zappos was a failure, as are the thousands (millions?) of startups that grow moderately, if at all, but provide a decent living for the entrepreneur, not to mention jobs for others.

And there are those that choose to stay private, such as SAS and its $2.43 billion in sales.

Shutting down a startup doesn’t mean you quit being an entrepreneur; being an entrepreneur is as much a matter of right idea / right time / right place / right circumstances as it is of your MAP.

And entrepreneur is not the same as entrepreneurial, which you can be in any size company, and defaming corporate jobs as of less value and that by working in one you are a failure is pure garbage.

As so many of the comments pointed out, failure only happens when nothing is learned and even that isn’t failure if you consider Einstein’s comment that expecting different results from doing the same thing over and over is insanity, not failure.

In my book the only time you can actually fail is when you are dead and as long as you weren’t the cause you still didn’t fail.

Flickr image credit: taygete05

The thing she [behavioral psychologist] taught me—and this sounds obvious—is that behavior is a function of consequence.  We had to change the behavior in the organization so that people felt safe to bring bad news. And I looked in the mirror, and I realized I was part of the problem.  I didn’t want to hear the bad news, either. So I had to change how I behaved, and start to thank people for bringing me bad news. —Joseph Jimenez, chief executive of Novartis

The behavioral psychologist was brought in after a consulting group was paid to provide “better, more robust process, with more analytics,” which changed nothing.

When we started RampUp Solutions in 1999, we spent a good deal of effort coming up with a tag line that easily explained the services we provide.

After several iterations we finally settled on “To change what they do change how you think”

Over the years, I’ve heard and read story after story of how all kinds of changes—from turn arounds to improved productivity to retention—all started with a change in the way the boss thought.

And that applied whether the boss was CEO, team leader or somewhere in-between.

Stories and discussions about change tend to focus on the actions that bring about the changes, instead of starting at the beginning with the hardest work,

Work that requires the boss, at whatever level, changing the way she thinks and then dispersing and embedding those changes throughout her organization.

So before you hire expensive consultants or seek help from advisors look in the mirror to determine how much of the problem is you.

Flickr image credit: manymeez

In the popular vernacular, the expression “mea culpa” is an admission of having made a mistake by one’s own fault (one that could have been avoided if the person had been more diligent).

Mea culpa are two of the most powerful words any manager can say—as long as they are authentic.

Creating a culture where mea culpa is not just tolerated, but applauded is the mark of the best ‘leadagers’ (Leader + Manager discussion).

They offer no value if they are uttered insincerely or as a means to an end.

Publicly taking responsibility for an error, let alone a real screw-up, is the mark of a good leader, a great manager and a true mensch.

How often have you said ‘mea culpa’ and meant it?

Flickr image credit: ZedBee | Zoë Power

There is a sizable difference between accepting positional leadership when a company is at the bottom and there is no place to go but up and taking over when its at its height—even more so when what was the growth engine and source of extraordinary profits disappears from the economic landscape.

It is one thing to maximize what you have, wringing out every last possible dollar, and investing in innovation for sustainable growth in the future.

It is one thing to create a culture where public shame and the likelihood of termination for missing your numbers rules and changing that to a culture that encourages appropriate risk-taking and never kills the messenger when the risk doesn’t pan out; a culture that understands not every innovation will be a home run, but encourages and applauds the effort anyway.

These are the differences between Jack Welch

But Welch had taken over when the company was in the bottom of an economic cycle. He took over GE in a recession, not the height of a bubble. Immelt got the job right after the end of the high-flying 1990s, an era which crowned CEOs with mythical, God-like crowns, and Welch was bestowed the biggest of them all.

and Jeff Immelt.

Immelt had known before the meltdown the company needed to ween off the leveraged risk from finance that was begun under Welch. … He admitted mistakes, as any good leader must do, and GE more quietly if not humbly went about its business in making the company a 21st century sustainable and reliable profit engine.

The differences are worth noting.

Flickr image credit: laurita13

John Greathouse is a VC at Rincon Venture Partners and he offers up some great advice about celebrating successes, both large and small.

I pretty much agree with all his ideas.

What I don’t agree with is that they are primarily for use in what he calls AdVentures (internet startups) and not in Big Dumb Companies (BDCs), which, he says, use newsletters.

While BDCs may indeed use newsletters, although due to expense I’m pretty sure they are mostly digital now, you don’t have to be a net startup to implement tweaked versions of Greathouse’s ideas in your organization—you just need people.

First, let’s restate the acronym and make it SSMLDC for Startup, Small, Medium, Large Dumb Company (yes, there are startup DCs), the key word is dumb, so we’ll call them DCs for short.

Some DCs don’t value their people (which make them happy hunting grounds for recruiters), while others just don’t show it.

But the real problem is one of individual managers, since they have the option of appreciating and caring whether those above them do or not.

No one says you have to manage like your boss or her boss or the company’s big boss.

I have seen many managers who are anything from a few degrees to 180 off from their company’s stated and/or de facto approach.

The good ones leave DCs for good companies and the bad ones leave for DCs.

If your goal is to be a great manager in any environment take the ideas that Greatehouse describes and tweak them to fit your group—whether you’re a VP or a team leader

After all, just because you work for a dumb jerk (DJ) doesn’t mean you have to be one.

Image credit: Fickr image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/zedbee/103147140/

Win some, lost some is the mantra of business from the largest global enterprise to the newest startup to the micro entrepreneur.

That’s true whether ‘win some’ means a quarter filled with Wall Street plaudits and ‘lose some’ means your stock crashed or ‘win some’ is being able to afford a restaurant dinner after the bills are paid and ‘lose some’ sends you scraping to pay the mortgage.

Winning is easier, often driven as much if not more by the economy than by management skill.

While losing is also affected by the economy, there are enough wins that losing is more about skill—or is it?

Maurice Ewing talks offers up some useful tips on losing your first million. Written for entrepreneurs, it’s applicable to anyone, personally or professionally.

Here are the tips, for details read his HBR post.

1. Making losses is part of making money.
2. Just lose money — not perspective.
3. Never love the business — love doing business.
4. Losses do not make you a loser but how you handle them might.
5. Stuff happens.
6. Loss does bring some advantages.

Perhaps losing is more about MAP.

Perhaps it’s more about what you make out of what happened.

Perhaps it’s not just/all about you.

Yet all Ewing’s tips, along with my ruminations, apply just as well to winning.

Think of it as two sides of the same coin or the inseparableness of Yin and Yang.

Win some, lose some…

As with many things, your choice lies not in winning or losing, but in how you choose to respond to whichever is currently happening.

Flickr image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/j_obsworth/4984121965/

I have an eclectic selection for you today, with no unifying theme, but I have faith that you are all savvy enough to deal with it.

First is a different twist on a familiar subject. The idea that failure can be a good thing isn’t new, but Professor Baba Shiv, professor of marketing at Stanford Graduate School of Business, has a new twist that is valuable to companies and individuals alike. He identified two mindsets, one fearful of making mistakes and the other fearful of losing out on opportunities, and describes how to shift from the first to the second.

A fascinating article in The Atlantic looks at new research on the concerns of the really, really rich. Seems as if the worry about the same things as most of us—“their sense of isolation, their worries about work and love, and most of all, their fears for their children”—relatively speaking, of course.

Normally, no one wants to see anybody made obsolete by a computer, but does ‘normally’ include lawyers? Because that is what’s happening, at least when it comes to stuff like discovery.

Finally, I’ll leave you with some addictive fun. You probably saw or read about Watson, IBM’s most advanced artificial intelligence computer that won Jeopardy. Now, thanks to the New York Times, you have the chance to challenge a computer. One caveat, it’s addictive.

Enjoy!

Image credit:  MykReeve on flickr