A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read allIf the Shoe Fits posts here.
If you were sitting in Starbucks and heard the following from a man and a woman you couldn’t see, what would your reaction be?
If we can get every business in the world to adopt a global problem, get slightly smaller businesses to adopt a national problem, get smaller businesses still to adopt local problems, then we can get on top of pretty well every problem in the world.
Snicker at their naiveté? Wonder how they would monetize the idea? Drool a bit over the enormous trove of data they would have? Maybe give some thought on how you could get into the action?
Not that you would admit those thoughts in public.
But in the end, you would probably just shrug and write them off as a couple of idealistic dreamers who were unlikely to get anywhere with ideas like that.
Why?
Because they didn’t sound as if they had the passion, the drive, the pure grit, to pull off a truly world-changing idea.
All these scenarios are predicated on the assumption that the people talking were just people.
Now a Carmine Gallo, a much bigger name than me, has written The Storyteller’s Secret, highlighting the importance of story from building a culture to building a brand or entire company.
Vinod Khosla, billionaire venture capitalist here in Silicon Valley, where I live, tells me that the biggest problem he sees is that people are fact-telling when they pitch him. They’re giving facts and information and he says, “that’s not enough, Carmine. They have to do storytelling.”
When Ben Horowitz, co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz, another big venture capital firm, tells me the most underrated skill is storytelling, or when Richard Branson, who I interviewed, said, “entrepreneurs who cannot tell a story will never be successful”
Of course, what can you expect from generations that don’t read much and think communication is an email or, worse yet, texting?
Every day at the Ritz-Carlton there is a brief morning meeting of housekeeping.
And they ask the question of the employees: “Is there a great customer experience that you’ve been a part of, that you can share with the rest of us? (…)They start sharing stories with one another, and then they start competing for who has better stories. They get recognized publicly.”
Southwest’s success is the result of a masterful storytelling culture.
So they created what’s called a storytelling culture, where every week the HR teams go out, and they take videos of real passengers who have had a struggle, or have maybe almost missed a funeral or a birth, or a life-changing event, and stuff like that. But they were able to do it because of Southwest.
Apple is a giant at storytelling, as is Microsoft and Zappos.
So is Whole Foods, KPMG, every farm-to-table restaurant and even ugly food.
Just don’t kid yourself about why the stories work.
The work because they are real, true, authentic or any other adjective you care to use.
The stories are based on/backed by employee actions, which is what makes them resonate.
That means the CEO and all the executive team not only believes in the importance of customer experience, but also knows that the experience is created and facilitated by their people at all levels — especially the front-line people.
Richard Branson started talking about “doing good by doing well” years ago and multinationals across the globe are finally getting on board.
Not because they suddenly grew a social conscience, but because it pays.
CSR or Corporate Social Responsibility has gone global, with companies across the spectrum.
But increasingly, it is what investors, customers, employees and other stakeholders have come to expect and demand. Millennials — industry’s new and future customers — cast a particularly keen eye on companies’ commitment to social impact.
Microsoft, Disney, Gap, JP Morgan Chase, Mattel, Coke, Pepsi, India’s Tata Group and Suzlon Energy, Chinese battery maker BYD, Brazil’s Natura Cosmeticos.
“The better CSR programs, either in emerging multinationals or developed-country multinationals … are not just philanthropy, they’re strategic.”
Internally CSR attracts customers and investors, can be used as a recruiting tool and beefs up retention.
And keep in mind that corporate social responsibility isn’t just for big, wealthy companies. SMB and even solopreneurs are in a position to make a difference, especially in their own local community.
Read the article for ideas.
Look around for a project that excites you and all your stakeholders.
In my eyes, personality always wins over book smarts. Company knowledge and job-specific skills can be learned, but you can’t train a personality.
Expert qualifications or skilled generalist?
Time and time again I’ve seen people with a background of broad-ranging employment and skills hired for a job where they don’t necessarily tick the specialist criteria boxes, but become incredibly successful by offering a new level of understanding to the role.
Do you hire what you know or what you don’t.
Spanx’s CEO Sara Blakely once said to me: “The smartest thing I ever did in the early days was to hire my weaknesses.” I couldn’t agree more. I can attribute a lot of my success in business to hiring people who had the skills I lacked.
Is their passion/purpose focused on your vision or to learn enough to focus on their own?
Purpose is no longer a buzzword. It’s a must-have. Passion and purpose will keep people focused on the job at hand, and ultimately separate the successful from the unsuccessful.
Do you grab available talent or hold out for the right person?
While it may seem like a desperate rush to get somebody through the door to help carry the load, it is worth being patient to find the right person, rather than unbalancing the team.
So the next time you find yourself salivating over a programmer who can crush Ruby, but thinks he is a god, think like Richard Branson, before doing “whatever it takes” to hire him.
I have a great appreciation for those in the 1% that give back, especially those like Richard Branson, who became an entrepreneur specifically to finance his desire to give back or, as he says, “do good by doing well.”
But even the most philanthropic like their toys — especially the kind with four wheels.
AeroMobil was designed in a way to fit into existing road infrastructure – its size is comparable to a limousine or a large luxury sedan. It has low maintenance costs and can be parked in regular parking slots in cities. It uses standard gasoline instead of kerosene, and it can therefore be fuelled at a regular gas stations.
You’ll need flying lessons, but it sure beats those fancy, earthbound cars — they’re so common.
There’s been a social media firestorm since Tom Perkins had his say in defense of the so-called 1%.
I asked a retired serial entrepreneur who was funded by KPCB decades ago when the names on the door were actually working partners what he thought.
Tom was reasonably liberal when he was running KP. Many VC’s who had made tons of dough became very conservative as they aged, supporting right wing Republican and Libertarian causes. They seemed to regard it as an insult that the government was trying to take even a tiny smidgeon of their billions in taxes.
I get why Perkins comments incited so much noise, both sincere and politically correct, but the real story a few days earlier didn’t get the play it deserved.
Here’s the headline that should have gotten more attention.
This means the world’s poorest 3,550,000,000 (3.55 billion) people must live on what the richest 85 possess.
The statistics are from non-profit Oxfam and are neither political nor partisan—they just are.
Nor are they an indictment of the US, since they are global.
In line with the mantra of “think globally, act locally” what can you do to help change this?
KG Charles-Harris says,
“It’s really action in the little ways that makes a difference. Not everyone has to do big things, but small things are possible every day with little cost.”
Here are some ideas,
Choose your role models more carefully; Richard Branson, Bill Gates and, more recently Mark Zukerberg are all in the 85%, but they model their lives very differently from Larry Ellison or the Koch Brothers.
Commit to giving one week’s worth of what you normally spend on coffee to a cause you care about.
Do the same with the time you save.
I’ll end by borrowing a line from a 1971 Alka-Seltzer® ad, “Try it, you’ll like it.”
According to Daniel Isenberg, “entrepreneurs are contrarian value creators. They see economic value where others see heaps of nothing. And they see business opportunities where others see only dead ends.”
But Isenberg also believes (along with many others) that “the main motivator for entrepreneurs is the chance of making big money.”
Richard Branson believes, “If you get into entrepreneurship driven by profit, you are a lot more likely to fail. The entrepreneurs who succeed usually want to make a difference to people’s lives, not just their own bank balances. The desire to change things for the better is the motivation for taking risks and pursuing seemingly impossible business ideas.”
Branson has a great belief that Profit and social good are not an oxymoron or mutually exclusive.
In Screw Business As Usual Branson says that from the very start his entrepreneurial drive wasn’t for money, but to have the wherewithal to fund his charitable efforts.
And over the years he’s done exactly that by funneling much of his wealth into Virgin Unite and through Virgin Unite to many entrepreneurs in the developing world and beyond, as well as creating and funding The B Team: “Our mission is to deliver a Plan B that puts people and planet alongside profit.”
“In the worldwide battle to get dog owners to clean up after their pets, enter Brunete, a middle-class suburb of Madrid fed up with dirty parks and sidewalks.”
Brunette’s mayor wanted a more creative solution that didn’t rely on substantial fines, because in tough economic times that fine could be the difference between eating and going hungry.
With the creative help of McCann Erickson, Brunete’s mayor tried a totally new approach to the poop—along the lines of ‘return to sender’.
Instead, this town engaged a small army of volunteers to bag it, box it and send it back to its owners. (…) Delivering 147 boxes of the real stuff seems to have produced a far more lasting effect in this town of about 10,000 residents. The mayor guesses a 70 percent improvement even now, several months after the two-week campaign.
The campaign wasn’t done as a surprise;
At first, Ricardo Rovira, who was part of the design team at the agency, worried that the mayor would not have the courage to go ahead with its direct marketing idea. But he did. McCann also made an amusing public awareness video, produced by Juan José Ocio, largely using actors. It was shown around town before concerts and community meetings.
According to Rovira, the campaign also netted McCann some real clients with serious money to spend.
This has been a fun little doing well by doing good story on a summer Wednesday that, hopefully, will inspire you/your company to DIY.
A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here
Many of the people who start companies are focused on getting rich—period.
Entrepreneurship is living a few years of your life as most people won’t so that you can spend the rest of your life like most people can’t. –Anon
But there are many others—more now than ever before and growing—who start companies with a different focus.
They aim to do good by doing well and make the world a better place.
Both would like the tiny bit of immortality that comes with real innovation.
The one thing they all agree on is that whatever it is needs to be done now, because there may not be a ‘later’.
Of course, that goes for everything in life, not just being an entrepreneur.
The most elegant phrasing of ‘why now’ was in a short essay I read recently.
You are older at this moment than you’ve ever been before, and it’s the youngest you’re ever going to get. The mortality rate is holding at a scandalous 100 percent.
That pretty much says it all, so whatever you’ve been “thinking about doing” or “planning” STOP.
Of all the high profile entrepreneurs who have built wildly successful companies my favorite is Tony Hsieh.
Hsieh is amazing from his MAP and the culture it engenders to the lengths he’s willing to go to propagate and share it—which includes renovating an entire city.
Hsieh is one of those increasingly rare people with an abundance of common sense who eschews ideology and focuses on doing real good in his community well beyond what’s necessary.
A healthy take on doing good by doing well in a very capitalistic way.
The $350 million breaks out as follows, $200 million invested in land and buildings; $50 million for small businesses; $50 million for tech startups/companies and $50 million to be used for education.
Typically companies like Zappos build spectacular campuses offering their employees all the amenities in their own little world, but that approach actually went against parts of the Zappos culture, which promotes unstructured interactions among the staff.
Hsieh took that attitude and created a different vision for the new campus.
He leased the former City Hall — smack in the middle of downtown Vegas — for 15 years. Then he got to thinking: If he was going to move at least 1,200 employees, why not make it possible for them to live nearby? And if they could live nearby, why not create an urban community aligned with the culture of Zappos, which encourages the kind of “serendipitous interactions” that happen in offices without walls? As Zach Ware, Hsieh’s right-hand man in the move, put it, “We wanted the new campus to benefit from interaction with downtown, and downtown to benefit from interaction with Zappos.”
In typical Hsieh fashion the effort is summed up in a way that reflects what is really needed from today’s business leaders.
“Every factory in the world is doing everything to maximize R.O.I. We’re doing everything to maximize R.O.C.—Return On Community.” –Tony Hsieh.
Entrepreneurs face difficulties that are hard for most people to imagine, let alone understand. You can find anonymous help and connections that do understand at 7 cups of tea.
Crises never end.
$10 really does make a difference and you’ll never miss it,
Of all the high profile entrepreneurs who have built wildly successful companies my favorite is Tony Hsieh.
