How great leaders inspire action

Building the right company culture and setting a mission everyone is behind is a prerequisite for success. Easy to say, much harder to do.

Simon Sinek, in his Ted lecture, articulates much of why this matters and how it can be done. There’s some good material in here and it can be useful for resetting the way you position your company or product. It’s a good piece to share with your own team, if nothing more than to get everyone thinking in a different way. Sinek uses a simple model for explaining why companies like Apple get it right and most other fall short – it might explain why Apple’s market cap has just over taken Microsoft’s .

Sinek, explains that your average everyday Joe would describe Apple’s business in the following:

• “We make great computers. They’re beautifully designed, simple to use and user friendly. Want to buy one?”

Mr. Jobs, on the other hand, would describe it more like this:

• “Everything we do, we believe in challenging the status quo. We believe in thinking differently. The way we challenge the status quo is by making our products beautifully designed, simple to use and user friendly. We just happen to make great computers. Want to buy one?”

Herein lays the answer…

If you have another 15 minutes handy, a great lead-on from from the Sinek video is Steve Job’s Commencement Speech given at Stanford in 2005. Again, a good starting point if you are looking for a culture tweak or you want to build some clarity around your mission.

Do your homework?

Find out what their strategic technology road map is and build yourself into it
Find out where they are in their budget process – what small things can you do to get started. They have small hidden pockets of money you can make work for you.

Get found by a partner (how do they know you’re there)?

Be a match maker
Consultants and brokers e.g. NineSigma, YourEncore, VCs
Escouting e.g. Yet2.com, LinkedIN (link with your target group and send monthly “ping” of information, leverage introductions).

Take an approach that works?

Select a business unit to go after
Write an email to business unit head (P&L owner) & ccEmail to CTO and the licensing person of the business unit (hopefully one will bite)
Through linkedin find a thought leader in the business unit

TIP: Make sure the subject line of your email stands out, otherwise it will not be read.

Create a Board of advisors:

Find 2 retired “lifers” from the type of companies you want partner with. Retired Business Unit head is the best.

Invite your IP lawyer to your meetings. He/she will pick up on new ideas that can be patented.

Here’s an email i received from a friend today. It’s a pretty common question for a small business looking to grow and i get this one asked quite a lot.

“What do you know about raising capital or private equity?   We’re getting our “financial management” service offering down and we’ve partnered with another company that brings an element of Intellectual property and Monitoring capability.  do you have some time to chat over coffee/lunch/beer this week?”

There is so much useful educational content out but it’s just a case of knowing where to find it.  I thought i would post my reply. Here’s my email reply back to him {i choose food for payment}.

“I  dont know where your knowledge level starts but this might help. Here’s a lecture that you mind find useful. Download it to your ipod or listen online. This whole series of lectures are pretty good (and they’re British so they must be good). You’ll want to start with lecture #5 -

• “Raising Capital and doing deals” from Oxford University (53 minutes)

And this guy is good as well (you may just hear audio first. Wait and you’ll see him start drawing on the blackboard):

• Raising money for a start-up (10 minutes)

• Getting seed round from a VC (11 minutes)

A previous blog post of mine:

• 3 reasons why your small business will not be able to raise money

If you get a chance to look at this, let me know what you think. I can get more or less technical when we meet.

phil”