Our kick-off speaker this morning at USASBE was Guy Kawasaki.
Guy Kawasaki is a managing director of Garage Technology Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm, and a columnist for Entrepreneur Magazine. In addition to his blog, which I know many of you frequent, Guy is the author of several books including The Art of the Start.
Guy began his career as an Apple Fellow at Apple Computer, Inc., where for four years he evangelized Macintosh to software and hardware developers and led the charge against world-wide domination by IBM. Guy left Apple to start a Macintosh database company called ACIUS, which published a product called 4th Dimension.
Later, he returned to Apple as an Apple Fellow, where his main task was to maintain and rejuvenate Macintosh customers. A few years later, he left Apple to co-found Garage Technology Ventures, a venture capital firm and making direct investments in early-stage technology companies.
Guy offered many pearls of wisdom, but one of the best that I had not heard from him before was this:
“An old Chinese proverb says this: ‘If you wait by the river eventually the body of your enemy will float by.'”
Too many entrepreneurs are impatient and impulsive. They lock themselves into a cat and mouse game with competitors. In doing so, they become too clever by half. Put your energy into your employees and your customers.
Good things take time. It takes time to build a successful business and it takes time to build wealth. Take the high road, work hard, stick to your vision, make your customers your evangelists, and all those competitors you are obsessing about will take care of themselves.
Dr Jeff Cornwall
Co-founder of The Entrepreneurial Mind, serial entrepreneur and professor of entrepreneurship.
Good observation . . .
Many entrepreneurs are impatient, impulsive, obsessive, hyper-competitive – and these are all good things at certain times. At other times, they are the seeds of destruction. I have found that a second partner, or the first management person brought on can sometimes balance those tendencies. Unfortunately, this kind of entrepreneur also seems incredibly unwilling to release any slight amount of influence and control to such a balance wheel.
The fine arts have these personalities frequently – we call them starving in the garrets artists. And that is often what happens to such entrepreneurs. I call them the ‘ Do or do NOT. There is no plan’ types. Rfunny that you meet such times much less frequently in more mature business environs.
Mike
Golf, eh? Hmmm.. I like the analogy. Now I swung a golf club when I was a kid, but the target was a neighbour’s newly planted trees (I don’t know why). To this day, I dislike holding a golf club – and re-planting trees.
I do however, play hockey, or did play hockey. And starting a business is a lot like that. The speed, the evolving of creative strategy and tactics at high speed, the physical positional play, and as you note, dealing with the unexpected and unpredictable. If you have no plan, by the time you react, or worse yet, react badly, you will find yourself in serious business trouble. Nothing really replaces preparation : the military does wargames, sports teams conduct practices, physicians and nurses train exhaustively, and business entrepreneurs conduct planning exercises.
The plan as a product – as perishable as yesterday’s news. Planning, indispensable!
Mike