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

Looking for a great role model?

How about someone who founded his company 38 years ago and is still active in it?

Someone who built an amazing organization, with an incredible track record for success through every economic turn?

A financial innovator who created the first index fund available for individual investors?

Someone Time Magazine named one of the “world’s 100 most powerful and influential people” in 2004 when he was 75.

How about Jack Bogle, who founded and built The Vanguard Group.

“Vanguard now has 14,000 crew members, and it’s big business, and that doesn’t really appeal to me much. But those are the perils and blessings of success. When I get disturbed about all that size – $2.2 trillion is a lot of assets – I remind myself that we’re giving good careers to 14,000 people, and it’s a company that’s value-oriented, service-oriented, integrity-oriented.”

Bogle  offers some great wisdom, that, while it is applicable to everyone, is especially apropos for founders.

I pulled what I saw as the most important to share with you, starting with a salient quote by Frederick Buechner that Bogle used in a speech he gave at Princeton.

“To live is to experience all sorts of things. (…) Pay attention to your life.”

You can channel Jack Bogle by taking these five points to heart.

• “Follow your own instincts, try to be yourself and live your own life. I think there’s a lot of wisdom in that.”

• “Other than that, it comes down to some pretty simple things: First, don’t forget your family, because in the end, that’s all you really have. Next, be a decent human being, and don’t think you’re better than anybody else, no matter what your condition of wealth or importance.”

• “Indeed, never forget the important role of luck in your life. Never, never, never, never say, ‘I did it all myself.’ Nobody does it all themselves. And when somebody has the temerity to tell me they did, I say to them: ‘That’s wonderful. I’m not sure I’ve ever met anybody who did it all themselves, but could I ask you one question: How did you arrange to be born in the United States of America?’ “

• “The struggle is what it’s all about; people ask me about success. Success is a word I almost never use. Success sounds like you’ve achieved something, it’s done.”

• “But to be corny, though not inaccurate, success is a journey and not a destination. You don’t say, ‘I’ve arrived, I’m here.’ You say, ‘I’ll try to do a little better tomorrow, and all the tomorrows after that.’”

Follow these and you’ll be known not only as a winning founder, but also as an exemplary human being.

Image credit: HikingArtist

I hear the viral thing from a lot of entrepreneurs; it has practically achieved Holy Grail status when talking about marketing.

Not just from entrepreneurs, but from companies across the spectrum of size, industry or any other category you can think of.

Ask anyone directly or indirectly involved about their latest marketing campaign and you’ll likely hear someone say, “we hope it goes viral.”

I’ve also heard when something went viral that it was “more luck than brains,” but I never believed it.

I assumed that, like most thing that succeed, it was mostly brains with a dollop of luck that made it happen.

Now Jonah Berger, a Marketing professor at Wharton has proven my gut instinct was accurate.

Berger did the research and just published the results in Contagious: Why Things Catch On; not only the proof, but some good guidance on increasing your viral chances.

Word of mouth isn’t random and it’s not magic. By understanding why people talk and share, we can craft contagious content.

He found six key drivers that shape what people talk about and share; he calls them STEPPS, an acronym for

• Social Currency,
• Triggers,
• Emotion,
• Public,
• Practical Value, and
• Stories

So, the next time you craft a marketing scheme that includes a desire for viral think about STEPPS and even luck, but forget about hope.

Flickr image credit: seanrnicholson

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

These days any talk about luck is considered heresy.

But there is such a thing.

Malcolm Gladwell understands the role luck plays and explains it in Outliers: The Story of Success.

A woman I know said, “You can be the best parent in the world, but raising great kids still requires a good dose of luck.”

Nolan Bushnell once said, “Don’t mistake good luck for good management.”

It’s luck when you bump into an investor having coffee with both the time and the inclination to listen; it’s hard work and being prepared that doesn’t waste the opportunity.

When managing people, process or circumstances, you can’t count on luck, but you also can’t ignore it.

And you shouldn’t try to take credit for it.

Image credit: HikingArtist

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

Analysis by VC Anthony Tjan, founder of Cue Ball, found that 25% of both entrepreneurs and corporate business builders consider themselves lucky.

That’s a big percentage for something considered random, dubious or non-existent, depending on whom you ask.

Further research found “a combination of what we call a lucky attitude and a lucky network” as opposed to random luck.

What happens next? Does that attitude continue as success mounts?

But the biggest risk for top leaders is being complacent and overconfident — which amounts to being disconnected from the reality, attitude, and relationships that can sustain and take excellence to a new place.

Tjan recommends seven MAP functions to avoid the disconnect:

• humility, the lack of which leads to arrogance;
• intellectual curiosity, the lack of which also leads to arrogance;
• optimism, looking first for the positive attracts great people, while the opposite repels them;
• vulnerability, the best preventative for arrogance;
• authenticity, which is lost when shrouded in spin; worse, believing the spin leads to arrogance;
• generosity, no matter your success, share your knowledge sans the ‘what’s in it for me’ attitude; and
• openness, willingness to a listen to new ideas from 360 degrees of non-traditional sources.

Read the article (it’s short) and then share your thoughts on luck below.

Option Sanity keeps you lucky.

Come visit Option Sanity for an easy-to-understand, simple-to-implement stock process.  So easy a CEO can do it.

Warning.

Do not attempt to use Option Sanity™ without a strong commitment to business planning, financial controls, honesty, ethics, and “doing the right thing.”
Use only as directed.
Users of Option Sanity may experience sudden increases in team cohesion and worker satisfaction. In cases where team productivity, retention and company success is greater than typical, expect media interest and invitations as keynote speaker.

Flickr image credit: HikingArtist

I’ve always had a sneaking suspicion that as important as hard work, good planning, etc., are, there was something else at work in my life. Something outside of my control and I wanted to know what it was.

I finally decided it was luck—definitely outside my control.

I wrote recently abut how the luck of right time/right place luck played a role in the early success of a startup and also touched on Malcolm Gladwell’s research as described in Outliers: The Story of Success.

A few days ago I read a brief article about University of Chicago researchers Susan Goldin-Meadow and Meredith Rowe, who have been studying the effects of gesturing on toddler language development.

“Higher-income parents did gesture more and, more importantly, their children on average produced 25 meanings in gesture during that 90-minute session, compared with an average of 13 among poorer children, they reported in the journal Science. … Gesturing also seems to be an important precursor to forming sentences, as children start combining one word plus a gesture for a second word. … In fact, kindergarten vocabulary is a predicter of how well youngsters ultimately fare in school.”

Such a little thing, but with such potentially enormous impact.

I don’t remember my mother gesturing, but I do know that she talked to my sister and I using the exact same vocabulary that she used with her peers and that became our vocabulary. Fortunately for us, she had a large vocabulary between having gone to college and being an avid reader, but I wonder where I would be if that had been different.

Plus, researchers are finding that children start learning long before it was originally thought.

The problem is that from zero to six kids dependent on what they get from home; from 6 or so to18 or so they look to their peers, which is the blind leading the blind, and then it’s on to adulthood where changes are far more difficult and, if the research is at all accurate, limited.

No one can control when they’re are born, who their parents are or the economic strata into which they’re born, but you can reach out and help change the people’s luck.

And for all those who look at me and say that they’re busy or that they have donated all they can or it’s just not their problem and there are schools/social services/etc., to deal with it I have a news flash for you.

Unless you plan to die tomorrow, it’s your problem.

It’s your problem because of a little thing called demographics.

This recession will eventually turn around, even if it takes longer than our instant gratification culture likes, and when it does the US is going to need every warm body if it plans to retain/regain its success and influence.

No one is expecting you to solve the problems, but you can reach out and touch just one life. If everyone over 21 did that we would be well on the way to change.

Your choice is whether to be part of the good luck or the bad.

Your comments—priceless

Don’t miss a post, subscribe via RSS or EMAIL

Image credit: flickr

Is it talent and smarts—or is it luck. How real is the old saw ‘the luck of the draw’? Apparently more than you might think.

Not just luck of the draw, but definitely ‘right place/right time’.

First, I read an article regarding the serendipity-based success of Ustream.tv, a new website.

It started when a “Bay Area couple’s pet Shiba Inu, a kind of Japanese hunting dog, gave birth, and its owners decided to train a Webcam on the newborn pups so they could keep an eye on them from work…after a Ustream employee spotted the Webcast and began passing it around to friends and family, the video went, as they say, viral. It has had 6 million viewers, 4 million in the last week alone, spanning the globe from Egypt to Venezuela. Those viewers have streamed nearly 4 million hours, or 391 years, of doggie video…” Pretty good for a site that normally has around ten million US visitors a month.

A little over a week later I read a review of Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success that documents the premise of luck and right time/right place.

Gladwell looks at impact of when you’re born. Consider these high tech legends, Bill Gates, born 1955, Paul Allen, born 1953, Steve Jobs, born 1955, and Bill Joy and Scott McNealy, born 1954.

Coincidence? No. timing offered opportunities that wouldn’t have been there otherwise.

More proof?

“Two-thirds of Canada’s pro hockey players were born in January or February. The same holds true in college and high-school all-star teams. Canada organize kids by age, based on the calendar year. Children born in the first two months of the year are inevitably larger and more coordinated than teammates six to 10 months younger. So they get more ice time, more coaching, and more chances to excel.”

Obviously, luck and right time/right place aren’t any kind of guarantee. It still takes a lot of hard work and effort. Companies can’t count on puppies and kids can’t count on being conceived in the merry month of May.

Companies need to pay better attention to serendipity and look for how it can be replicated or enhanced.

For kids, there needs to be a way to level the playing field, because we’re wasting an enormous amount of talent for silly reasons such as being born too late in the year. As Gladwell says, “When we misunderstand or ignore the real lessons of success, we squander talent,”

Image credit: sxc.hu