According to a study published last week by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, entrepreneurial activity was up slightly in 2007, despite a sharp drop in the rate at which women participated in the business startup process. This is a fascinating, detailed study worthy of your attention. Read more and download the entire report here.
The study itself hazards no guesses as to why "men are now twice as likely as women to start a business each month" (the highest gap ever reported since the study began in 1996). I'd like your thoughts, though...please comment by clicking on "comments" below.
Monday, April 28, 2008
Wednesday, April 9, 2008
Smart or Healthy?
In 1790, Thomas Jefferson - an accomplished leader by any standards - said, "Health is worth more than learning." A well-educated man, he reasoned, can't put learning to good use - to benefit himself or others - unless he's healthy and functional.
More than 200 years later, the same holds true for many organizations. I've worked closely with hundreds of successful entrepreneurs - they're ALL smart. After all, building a successful business from scratch requires intelligence and a whole lot more.
However many entrepreneurial leaders focus almost exclusively on business intelligence, as leadership guru Patrick Lencioni explains. "Smart is the realm of decision science, which is where marketing, strategy, technology and business come into play. Critical stuff, but most executives spend about 95 percent of their time on that. "
Smart is easier. It's quantifiable, measurable. Organizational health, on the other hand, is intangible, behavioral and emotional. It is easy to dismiss the idea of a "healthy company" as unimportant, especially in a company's early days when everyone's sprinting just to stay on the treadmill. That remains true today despite the worldwide popularity of important works like Jim Collins' and Jerry Porras' Built to Last. That well-researched book, along with dozens of brilliant follow-ups (Collins' Good to Great, Michael Gerber's E-Myth Revisited, and several terrific Lencioni books) have proven beyond the shadow of a doubt that - however smart - unhealthy companies simply cannot become truly great.
So what is a healthy leadership team? It's open and honest. It regards the long-term greater good of the organization as more important than any one person's needs. It meets regularly in brief, productive sessions. There's plenty of disagreement and debate, but at the end of the day everyone is on the same page, committed to rowing in the same direction.
If you're part of a smart team that isn't getting the results it should, consider working harder on becoming healthy. You'll soon find that smart AND healthy is hard to beat.
More than 200 years later, the same holds true for many organizations. I've worked closely with hundreds of successful entrepreneurs - they're ALL smart. After all, building a successful business from scratch requires intelligence and a whole lot more.
However many entrepreneurial leaders focus almost exclusively on business intelligence, as leadership guru Patrick Lencioni explains. "Smart is the realm of decision science, which is where marketing, strategy, technology and business come into play. Critical stuff, but most executives spend about 95 percent of their time on that. "
Smart is easier. It's quantifiable, measurable. Organizational health, on the other hand, is intangible, behavioral and emotional. It is easy to dismiss the idea of a "healthy company" as unimportant, especially in a company's early days when everyone's sprinting just to stay on the treadmill. That remains true today despite the worldwide popularity of important works like Jim Collins' and Jerry Porras' Built to Last. That well-researched book, along with dozens of brilliant follow-ups (Collins' Good to Great, Michael Gerber's E-Myth Revisited, and several terrific Lencioni books) have proven beyond the shadow of a doubt that - however smart - unhealthy companies simply cannot become truly great.
So what is a healthy leadership team? It's open and honest. It regards the long-term greater good of the organization as more important than any one person's needs. It meets regularly in brief, productive sessions. There's plenty of disagreement and debate, but at the end of the day everyone is on the same page, committed to rowing in the same direction.
If you're part of a smart team that isn't getting the results it should, consider working harder on becoming healthy. You'll soon find that smart AND healthy is hard to beat.
Thursday, April 3, 2008
Hitting the Ceiling
One of my best friends has a green thumb. Her garden is spectacular, and her house is filled with healthy, thriving plants. It's not just a gift. She's developed some real expertise over the years and also works very hard - growing plants is as hard as growing a business.
That analogy became crystal clear last weekend as I watched her transplant a begonia into a bigger pot. The root ball she removed from the old pot was a thing of wonder - the roots were so thick and tangled that it was hard to imagine there was any soil left in the pot. Above ground the plant had looked fine, but my friend knew that danger was imminent without change.
Many business owners know this feeling well. As a rule, companies don't grow steadily forever without some friction, turbulence and real pain. We call these inevitable periods "Hitting the Ceiling." If the stuff that's helped your business grow to this point doesn't seem to work any more and you feel stuck, your team has hit the ceiling.
USC Professor Larry Greiner first described this phenomenon in a timeless 1979 Harvard Business Review article entitled "Evolution and Revolution as Organizations Grow." Greiner explained that companies pass through a series of distinct developmental phases as they grow. "Each phase begins with a period of evolution, steady growth, and stability, and ends with a revolutionary period of organizational turmoil and change," says Greiner. To lead a company through these painful periods, he explains, management must adopt new practices that become the basis for the next phase of evolutionary growth.
But this is a cycle that gets played out many times in any growing organization, so it’s important not to relax once you've broken through the ceiling. In fact, Greiner explains that the new practices you adopt will "eventually outlast their usefulness and lead to another period of revolution. Managers therefore experience the irony of seeing a major solution in one period become a major problem in a later period."
The EOS process is designed to equip leadership teams with the ability to better recognize these revolutionary periods as they approach and to successfully navigate the company through the challenges and obstacles they present. If your company is stuck and nothing that's worked before seems to help - it might be time to transplant your leadership team into a new pot - a way of operating that's more likely to grow your company into the garden you imagine it can be.
That analogy became crystal clear last weekend as I watched her transplant a begonia into a bigger pot. The root ball she removed from the old pot was a thing of wonder - the roots were so thick and tangled that it was hard to imagine there was any soil left in the pot. Above ground the plant had looked fine, but my friend knew that danger was imminent without change.
Many business owners know this feeling well. As a rule, companies don't grow steadily forever without some friction, turbulence and real pain. We call these inevitable periods "Hitting the Ceiling." If the stuff that's helped your business grow to this point doesn't seem to work any more and you feel stuck, your team has hit the ceiling.
USC Professor Larry Greiner first described this phenomenon in a timeless 1979 Harvard Business Review article entitled "Evolution and Revolution as Organizations Grow." Greiner explained that companies pass through a series of distinct developmental phases as they grow. "Each phase begins with a period of evolution, steady growth, and stability, and ends with a revolutionary period of organizational turmoil and change," says Greiner. To lead a company through these painful periods, he explains, management must adopt new practices that become the basis for the next phase of evolutionary growth.
But this is a cycle that gets played out many times in any growing organization, so it’s important not to relax once you've broken through the ceiling. In fact, Greiner explains that the new practices you adopt will "eventually outlast their usefulness and lead to another period of revolution. Managers therefore experience the irony of seeing a major solution in one period become a major problem in a later period."
The EOS process is designed to equip leadership teams with the ability to better recognize these revolutionary periods as they approach and to successfully navigate the company through the challenges and obstacles they present. If your company is stuck and nothing that's worked before seems to help - it might be time to transplant your leadership team into a new pot - a way of operating that's more likely to grow your company into the garden you imagine it can be.
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