Great by choice
The new question. Ten years after the worldwide bestseller Good to Great, Jim Collins returns with another groundbreaking work, this time to ask: Why do some companies thrive in uncertainty, even chaos, and others do not? Based on nine years of research, buttressed by rigorous analysis and infused with engaging stories, Collins and his colleague, Morten Hansen, enumerate the principles for building a truly great enterprise in unpredictable, tumultuous, and fast-moving times. The new study. Great by Choice distinguishes itself from Collins's prior work by its focus not just on performance, but also on the type of unstable environments faced by leaders today. With a team of more than twenty researchers, Collins and Hansen studied companies that rose to greatness -- beating their industry indexes by a minimum of ten times over fifteen yearsin environments characterized by big forces and rapid shifts that leaders could not predict or control. The research team then contrasted these "10X companies" to a carefully selected set of comparison companies that failed to achieve greatness in similarly extreme environments. - Publisher.
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What Hacker News says
- the author leaves out a critical part of the story -- the canonical antifragile strategy is the "barbell" 80/20 strategy, in which one focuses the majority 80% on safe, reliable, even boring tactics. Options are relegated to the 20% because they can go to zero.
My buddy works at a huge old bank. When he complains about the bank job, I remind him the bank job is antifragile because huge banks are safe places (note; not investment banks doing risky stuff) -- this stability can translate into excitement and optionality for him in the other 20% of his life. Implicit in the notion of options which "cap your downside," is the fact you're willing to accept that downside. You can't do that if you're in a precarious position.
Universea might buy a lot of out-of-the-money puts, but they also hold vastly more money worth of bonds.
Also, that chart of long stock vs call options is dead wrong because the options are on a different scale from the stock. Long stock trades don't go into negative valuation. They go to negative ROI. Call options routinely go to zero valuation. when your option goes to zero, your ROI is -100%, not zero.
If you measure risk in terms of the percent increase necessary to recover a loss, then a 100% loss is an infinite risk. It's really, really dumb to YOLO all in on options because of the gambler's fallacy, and the principal of maximum pain. That's why risky options are best done in small bets. Luckily for some, even if you lose your money, you still have your life, so you haven't truly lost everything!
If anyone is interested in an excellent book on antifragility for business, I recommend Jim Collins' Great by Choice. The audiobook is read by the author and he does a good job.
TLDR: Antifragile is only 20% about optionality. It's 80% about how to reduce or even reverse risk. Don't tunnel vision the 20 and forget the 80!
- I spent 25 years running successful small businesses and moving them from 1 man shows to becoming team based businesses. Here is the process I used successfully time after time in my business and helping other businesses.
1. Be super clear on your why: You must start by clarifying why are you doing what you are doing; why are you in an eLearning business. You are making good money and from what I read in some of your replies you are doing well fro yourself, so what drives you to wake up every day and go to work, what brings you joy. Why is this so important, because it's the key to everything else, for example, if you want to hire people for the long term, the must believe what you believe, if you want your business to grow beyond you, ie must be driven by a clear purpose (your why) Your why is a great for rapid decision-making, which speeds up things in your business, in hiring, in growing your customer base...etc
2. Be super clear on your goals: You have a successful business as it is, and expanding it is not going to be easy, it is more work for you, so why are doing that, what will things look like when your effort to expand your business are successful and you get everything you want, just the way you want it. This will help you clarify where you are heading and so you will be able to choose your the steps and measure your progress towards achieving your goals.
3. Start with 20%: In every business there is 20% of tasks and things to be done that are repetitive, mundane, laborious, maybe even boring for you. Even if you love what you do, there will still be things you like more than others. Start finding people to do those tasks. People who believe what you believe and love doing these tasks. This is a very safe starting point since these are not the major tasks that have major impact on your business.
4. Hire for personality more than skill: This may sound strange, but the top team members that I've every worked with and that outperformed everyone else were the ones that had the least skill but the biggest appetite for learning and growth. They were like a sponge, were willing to learn, and most importantly, they were not affected by the way things are done out in the world. As a one man show you may be doing things differently than how things are done in other big companies or the regular practices in other businesses, so you may want people that are willing to learn your way of doing things. People who are used to doing things in a certain way will drive you crazy trying to unlearn how they do things, while people who have less experience and more appetite for learning, are more open to learning your way. This is not to say that people with a lot of experience are bad, in fact if you can find great people with great experience, that would be ideal, as long as they are open to learning, willing to work with you and love to grow.
5. Continue your journey to 80%: Now that you have handed over 20% of the work to new team members. The ideal goal I suggest is to continue hand over tasks to existing and new team members until you reach 80% of your tasks delegated and handed over, that way you are only doing 20% of the work. You do thins gradually 30%, 40%, 50%...etc Keep identifying the tasks that are repetitive, the tasks that give you the least pleasure and joy, and keep finding people to do it. until you are left with only 20% of the work you originally used to handle, this 20% is the most important work that only you can do, it's the heart and soul of your business and your brand, the reason why people come to you and work with you. So you are still in full control of what matters most in your business.
6. Ensure Continuity with Processes: One of the things that will increase the value of your business and make it thrive no matter what happens to you, is to make it a process driven business. Make sure the people you hire spend 80% of their time doing the work, and 20% on enhancing and documenting how it's done. This is very different than reporting to you and increasing paperwork, that is not necessary. This is about them learning to do it better, not just from you, but on their own, and instead of just doing it, they create processes that describe how they do it now, and they keep updating the process as it evolves. The documentation needs to be clear to the point that they can easily hand it over to anyone on the team. This is crucial as this means that if they leave or anything happens, you can easily hire for the same position without having to lose the intelligence that has gone into teaching that person and the learning they developed by doing and enhancing their work. Documenting the process of how they do their work, will ensure that they learn more and advance in their work.
7. Never delegate leadership, develop leaders: you are the only person that is responsible for the totality of your business, so you must do the above yourself, do not delegate your responsibility, this is your business, you lead it, don't leave leadership to anyone else. You must develop your people to become leaders, by giving them the space to lead and working with them, helping them, supporting them, but neve hand them leadership, that is not how it works. By following the steps above, and by creating an environment where people are given the space to shine, you will see your team rising up to the tasks they are given and show up as leaders. One of the other ways people can show you what kind of leaders they are is to have them help you choose the new people, train them, and support them, even if they have different tasks and different roles, they are still a team and that dynamic will help you discover what kind of people they are.
8. Security and protection: While you can never fully protect anything, you can take conscious steps to make sure your business and the assets of your business (domains, sites...etc) are secure. Make sure you structure your contracts with your team to include nondisclosures and protection of business secrets. Include no competition clauses so they can't leave and take your clients or work for a competitor for at least 6-12 months. Finally, never give passwords away to give people access, use password protection services like LastPass to give people access to things without sharing your passwords. Also you can request form your service providers certain accesses to team members, that way you still have admin rights and you have the ability to add or remove people without giving access to the main account.
9. Be the role model, Keep on learning and growing: There are many mentors, coaches, business experts out there that you can work with to continue to grow and learn how to run your business better, explore that. And there are always brilliant business books that can expand your thinking and ability to lead. Here are a few I recommend: Anything for Jim Collins, especially Great By Choice Anything Seth Godin, especially Tribes Anything Simon Sinek, especially Start With Why and Leaders Eat Last Anything Charles Duhigg, especially The Power of Habit
I trust this is clear and helpful
Wish you all the best, and please reach out if you think there more I can help you with
- Traction by Justin Mares, Gabriel Weinberg - would probably reread
Growth Hacker Marketing by Ryan Holiday
How to Fail at Almost Everything by Scott Adams - great read Scaling Up By Verne Harnish
Great By Choice by Jim Collins - love the whole series
The Ultimate Sales Machine by Chet Holmes - probably worth a reread
How to Win at the Sport of Business By Mark Cuban - good read
Elon Mush by Ashlee Vance - need I say more
The Hard Thing about Hard Things By Ben Horowitz
The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg - probably need to deeply absorb this - a lot of good stuff
Copy This! By Paul Orfalea - another good "small business" entrepreneur book
The E-Myth Revisited By Michael Gerber - 2nd time read. Got more out of it this time.
The People's Tycoon (Ford) by Steven Watts - I love reading about businessmen from this age
Scrum by JJ Sutherland Jeff Sutherland - good read for development teams
- Outliers, definitely the freakenomics books, I enjoyed Rich Dad Poor Dad, The Lean Startup, Power of Habit, Defining Decade (if your in your 20's, fantastic book), The Happiness Advantage, Great by Choice from Jim collins...
- This goes back to Jim Collins book Great by Choice and the idea of Bullets then Cannonballs.
[1]"First, you fire bullets (low-cost, low-risk, low-distraction experiments) to figure out what will work—calibrating your line of sight by taking small shots. Then, once you have empirical validation, you fire a cannonball (concentrating resources into a big bet) on the calibrated line of sight. Calibrated cannonballs correlate with outsized results; uncalibrated cannonballs correlate with disaster. The ability to turn small proven ideas (bullets) into huge hits (cannonballs) counts more than the sheer amount of pure innovation."
[1] https://www.jimcollins.com/concepts/fire-bullets-then-cannon...
- See this Charlie Rose interview with Jim Collins on his new book, Great by Choice: Uncertainty, Chaos, and Luck -- Why Some Thrive Despite Them All, where Jim talks about what it takes for a genius/artist to thrive (http://www.hulu.com/watch/298461).
Maybe these "always starters" and "distracted geniuses" are in search for truth and purity -- for meaning -- and are continuously iterating on and refining their value system in such a way that their values change between the time they start exploring an idea until the time they understand the idea. Or maybe their values don't change during the process, but once they fully understand the idea they were exploring, they find it's not valuable enough for them to commit more time to, even though others might find it valuable.
Jim's research reveals that the big things happen at the rare cross between creativity and discipline. It's the genius/artist who when they see and set their hands on the big thing, they grab it by the throat and don't let go.
Maybe the path to this intersection of creativity and discipline is for the genius/artist to first focus on peeling back the layers within themselves -- to spend time contemplating until they find their core values -- to "know thyself" -- and then once they have gotten to the root, they'll have the clarity of purpose needed to align their core values with their work and will be able to pursue their life's purpose without being distracted by frivolous matters.
