Hire for attitude; train for skill
Seek out people with the right spirit, bubbling just beneath the surface, and get working with them. These people, by their nature and their outlook on life, enjoying working with others.
They're attentive.
They smile freely.
They're often lively, and fun to be with.
When you love what you do, you're too busy to stand on your dignity. When you're good at what you do, you don't worry so much about your image. So it's a positive sign when people don't take themselves too seriously.
There's another thing about teams: they don't last for ever.
Think of a team as being like the cast in a theatrical play. Actors who work too long together on the same show for too long grow stale.
When the business lets you, shake things up a little.
It's a fact of business life that people come and go. The offer of better prospects or career advancement elsewhere will naturally draw good people away from time to time. But what about the others - the ones who leave in order to do much the same thing, for much the same money, elsewhere? What went wrong?
Throwing money at people isn't the point. When people leave a good company, it's often because they don't feel good themselves. They feel underused, ignored, marginalised. Few people spend every spare hour scouring the jobs page hunting for higher salary.
Most are driven back into the jobs market by frustration.
Their bosses don't listen to them.
It's vital that we are allowed to feel good about what we do. After all, we only live once, and most of our time is spent at work.
If people are properly and regularly recognised for their initiative, then the business has to flourish. Why? Because it's their business; an extension of their personality. They have a stake in its success.
A self disciplined employee will have the patience to conduct routine business routinely, the talent to respond exceptionally to exceptional circumstances, and the wisdom to know the difference between the two.
Delivery
Good delivery depends upon many things.
Two of the most important elements are:
1. good communication
2. attention to detail - keep a notebook. Jot down things that need doing.
Every risk is worth taking as long as it's in a good cause, and contributes to a good life.
Delivery is never rocket science. Getting to grips with an unfamiliar infrastructure is simply a question of workload - of mastering detail.
However complex the business is, you should be able to boil it down to a proposition that ordinary people can understand.
Immerse yourself in every detail for months or even weeks, if often enough to get you started.
Keep your bankers informed of your every move. Let them know precisely your intentions.
Delivery is the moment where your good intentions meet the real world.
Delivery is best approached steadily, and with fortitude.
If you're a late entrant to a market, you need to be radically different to win over customers.
If you rip off the consumer, then you will destroy the integrity of the brand.
Let people know exactly what they are paying for - and reward those who stay with us.
When you're first thinking through an idea, it's important not to get bogged down in complexity. Thinking simply and clearly is hard to do. It takes concentration and practice and self-discipline.
It's easy to be hoodwinked by technical-sounding detail, and to parrot it at others, and to feel important in doing so. It's hard to ask the naive question. Nobody wants to look silly.
You can never go far too wrong by thinking like a consumer who's new to the business. If it makes no sense to them, then you're probably just fooling yourself.
Complexity is your enemy. Any fool can make something complicated. It is hard to make something simple.
Keep a cool head. You're in business to deliver change, and if you succeed, the chances that no one will get hurt are virtually zero.
This is the rough and tumble of business.
Be sportsmanlike, play to win, and stay friends with people wherever possible.
If you do fall out with someone, ring them a year later and take them out to dinner. Befriend your enemies.
Engage your emotions at work.
Your instincts and emotions are there to help you. They are there to make things easier.
Acquire details in your plans by testing against questions that on the face of it are really quite simple - and more to do with emotions than figures.
If you seek to create the best health club in town, will existing gym members go to all the bother of transferring their membership to you? If the answer is 'yes', then give it a go and see if it works.
The most critical factor in any business decision you'll ever have to make? It boils down to this question:
If this all crashes, will it bring the whole house tumbling down like a pack of cards?
One business mantra - protect the downside.
Learning from mistakes & setbacks
You can't protect yourself against the unexpected, so you need to keep your house in as good an order as you can. If disaster strikes, you don't want to find yourself doing twelve things at once and misprioritising them. It's vital that you take control of your internal business risks - the ones who can influence.
An entrepreneur has to make the tough calls. Some say it requires a ruthless streak. Actually, it's counterproductive to be ruthless. You've got the treat people as you would yourself, or better.
Any start-up business should sit down and take a long hard look at its legal agreements.
Look for people with exciting, dynamic CVs, not spotless ones. Don't be pushovers.
Be happy to take chances with people, to move them around, to see how they tick and where they fit in.
Don't pin the blame on people, or marginalise them when things go wrong.
Eventually people will realise that we're in a company that knows how to deal with its problems, and is willing to take chances. Be bold and unafraid.
If you've poured too many hours into a project, and it failed. Move on.
What if you can't move on? What if there is nowhere to move to?
Assuming you're not burning other people's money in their faces, you could always perform the hardest trick in the book of business tricks:
get very small, very specialised and very expensive.
You're taking a large operation and finding ways to scale it down, retarget it and remarket it, all the while adding bucketloads of value to justify the hike in price.
First thing to do when faced with a problem? Get together promptly to look for the answer to a single question "is there a way out?". And then go right to the endgame and ask "what is the ideal way out of this problem for everyone?"
Become 100 percent focused on trying to find that way out.
If it's a major problem, give it 100 percent of your time and energy until it is sorted.
Work night and day to resolve it, and try to delegate everything else that is going on.
If, having done this, you fail to resolve the problem, then at least you know you've done everything in your power you can.
Move on.
Innovation
In business, as in life, you can't afford to be afraid of doing the wrong thing.
Success in business never comes from inaction.
Innovation is what you get when you capitalise on luck, when you get up from behind your desk and go and see where ideas and people will lead you.
Entrepreneurs and leadership
In a small business, you can be both the entrepreneur and the manager while you are getting it going. But you need to know and understanding everything about the business. An emerging entrepreneur should sign every cheque. Examine every invoice. Know where the money is going.
If the business gets big, sign every single cheque that goes out for a month every six months. And suddenly you're asking "what on earth is this for?"
You'll be able to cut out unnecessary expenditure quite dramatically when you do that.
As a small business person, immerse yourself 100 percent in everything and learn about the ins and outs of every department. As it gets bigger, you'll be able to delegate, and when people come to you with problems, they'll be surprised how knowledgeable you are and how much practical advice you can offer. Because you've been there, done that. Also, decide if you're a manager or an entrepreneur. If you're a manager you can stay with that business and help it grow. If you're an entrepreneur, you need to find a manager. Then you should move on, enjoy yourself and then set up your next enterprise.
You must either stay ahead of other people, or stay ahead of yourself, all the time. If you really put your mind to it you are normally going to find a better way.
You have to keep questioning the way people do things.
Many people reading this will be affluent. If you don't feel affluent right now, take a minute and think: the very fact that you could afford to link up to the internet, read this off a screen - the very fact that you are able to read at all - marks you out as one of world history's richest and most privileged people.
There's not that many of us, and we haven't been affluent for very long, and so we're not very good at it yet. Affluence makes us lazy. It makes us complacent. It smothers us in cotton wool. If your job's well paid, who can blame you if you're not willing to take a rik and, say, set up your own company?
The vast majority are very happy with this arrangement, and good for them.
But if you want swashbuckling action in your life, become an entrepreneur and give it a go.
Learn the art of trying to set up your own business.
Which is the same as saying, learn the art of making mistakes and learning lessons.
Because if you want to be an entrepreneur and you don't make a few errors along the way, you certainly aren't going to learn anything or achieve very much.
People have a fear of failure and while this is perfectly reasonable, it's also very odd. Because it's through making mistakes that we learn how to do things.
Now there's a limit you may hit, beyond which you can't learn from your mistakes.
Don't expect a chart-topping album from yourself if you're not a singer, or a recital at Carnegie Hall, or a sequence of sonnets or any of the billion and one other things you are never going to be great at.
But that's not failure.
That's finding out what you're good at.
Failure is not giving things a go in the first place.
People who fail are those who don't have a go and don't make an effort.
Failures can't be bothered.
There are few people who've tried something and fallen who didn't get enormous satisfaction from trying, and there's more to learn from people who have tried and faltered than from the few charmed people for whom success came easy.
Social Responsibility
Good small solutions are like gold dust as it's often possible to scale them up, or replicate them manyfold, so that they may acquire a global influence. Muhammad Yunus's Grameen Bank is a classic example.
Don't let relative scale put you off your goals.
Think realistically and creatively about what you can achieve.
No one is asking you to save the planet.
Just dream up and work on a couple of good ideas.
No one expects you to find a global solution to everything.
Just make a difference where you can.
Local solutions have a value in themselves, and some can be scaled up, so it doesn't matter how modest your budget, you can and will make a difference.
There's another thing about teams: they don't last for ever.
Think of a team as being like the cast in a theatrical play. Actors who work too long together on the same show for too long grow stale.
When the business lets you, shake things up a little.
It's a fact of business life that people come and go. The offer of better prospects or career advancement elsewhere will naturally draw good people away from time to time. But what about the others - the ones who leave in order to do much the same thing, for much the same money, elsewhere? What went wrong?
Throwing money at people isn't the point. When people leave a good company, it's often because they don't feel good themselves. They feel underused, ignored, marginalised. Few people spend every spare hour scouring the jobs page hunting for higher salary.
Most are driven back into the jobs market by frustration.
Their bosses don't listen to them.
It's vital that we are allowed to feel good about what we do. After all, we only live once, and most of our time is spent at work.
If people are properly and regularly recognised for their initiative, then the business has to flourish. Why? Because it's their business; an extension of their personality. They have a stake in its success.
A self disciplined employee will have the patience to conduct routine business routinely, the talent to respond exceptionally to exceptional circumstances, and the wisdom to know the difference between the two.
Delivery
Good delivery depends upon many things.
Two of the most important elements are:
1. good communication
2. attention to detail - keep a notebook. Jot down things that need doing.
Every risk is worth taking as long as it's in a good cause, and contributes to a good life.
Delivery is never rocket science. Getting to grips with an unfamiliar infrastructure is simply a question of workload - of mastering detail.
However complex the business is, you should be able to boil it down to a proposition that ordinary people can understand.
Immerse yourself in every detail for months or even weeks, if often enough to get you started.
Keep your bankers informed of your every move. Let them know precisely your intentions.
Delivery is the moment where your good intentions meet the real world.
Delivery is best approached steadily, and with fortitude.
If you're a late entrant to a market, you need to be radically different to win over customers.
If you rip off the consumer, then you will destroy the integrity of the brand.
Let people know exactly what they are paying for - and reward those who stay with us.
When you're first thinking through an idea, it's important not to get bogged down in complexity. Thinking simply and clearly is hard to do. It takes concentration and practice and self-discipline.
It's easy to be hoodwinked by technical-sounding detail, and to parrot it at others, and to feel important in doing so. It's hard to ask the naive question. Nobody wants to look silly.
You can never go far too wrong by thinking like a consumer who's new to the business. If it makes no sense to them, then you're probably just fooling yourself.
Complexity is your enemy. Any fool can make something complicated. It is hard to make something simple.
Keep a cool head. You're in business to deliver change, and if you succeed, the chances that no one will get hurt are virtually zero.
This is the rough and tumble of business.
Be sportsmanlike, play to win, and stay friends with people wherever possible.
If you do fall out with someone, ring them a year later and take them out to dinner. Befriend your enemies.
Engage your emotions at work.
Your instincts and emotions are there to help you. They are there to make things easier.
Acquire details in your plans by testing against questions that on the face of it are really quite simple - and more to do with emotions than figures.
If you seek to create the best health club in town, will existing gym members go to all the bother of transferring their membership to you? If the answer is 'yes', then give it a go and see if it works.
The most critical factor in any business decision you'll ever have to make? It boils down to this question:
If this all crashes, will it bring the whole house tumbling down like a pack of cards?
One business mantra - protect the downside.
Learning from mistakes & setbacks
You can't protect yourself against the unexpected, so you need to keep your house in as good an order as you can. If disaster strikes, you don't want to find yourself doing twelve things at once and misprioritising them. It's vital that you take control of your internal business risks - the ones who can influence.
An entrepreneur has to make the tough calls. Some say it requires a ruthless streak. Actually, it's counterproductive to be ruthless. You've got the treat people as you would yourself, or better.
Any start-up business should sit down and take a long hard look at its legal agreements.
Look for people with exciting, dynamic CVs, not spotless ones. Don't be pushovers.
Be happy to take chances with people, to move them around, to see how they tick and where they fit in.
Don't pin the blame on people, or marginalise them when things go wrong.
Eventually people will realise that we're in a company that knows how to deal with its problems, and is willing to take chances. Be bold and unafraid.
If you've poured too many hours into a project, and it failed. Move on.
What if you can't move on? What if there is nowhere to move to?
Assuming you're not burning other people's money in their faces, you could always perform the hardest trick in the book of business tricks:
get very small, very specialised and very expensive.
You're taking a large operation and finding ways to scale it down, retarget it and remarket it, all the while adding bucketloads of value to justify the hike in price.
First thing to do when faced with a problem? Get together promptly to look for the answer to a single question "is there a way out?". And then go right to the endgame and ask "what is the ideal way out of this problem for everyone?"
Become 100 percent focused on trying to find that way out.
If it's a major problem, give it 100 percent of your time and energy until it is sorted.
Work night and day to resolve it, and try to delegate everything else that is going on.
If, having done this, you fail to resolve the problem, then at least you know you've done everything in your power you can.
Move on.
Innovation
In business, as in life, you can't afford to be afraid of doing the wrong thing.
Success in business never comes from inaction.
Innovation is what you get when you capitalise on luck, when you get up from behind your desk and go and see where ideas and people will lead you.
Entrepreneurs and leadership
In a small business, you can be both the entrepreneur and the manager while you are getting it going. But you need to know and understanding everything about the business. An emerging entrepreneur should sign every cheque. Examine every invoice. Know where the money is going.
If the business gets big, sign every single cheque that goes out for a month every six months. And suddenly you're asking "what on earth is this for?"
You'll be able to cut out unnecessary expenditure quite dramatically when you do that.
As a small business person, immerse yourself 100 percent in everything and learn about the ins and outs of every department. As it gets bigger, you'll be able to delegate, and when people come to you with problems, they'll be surprised how knowledgeable you are and how much practical advice you can offer. Because you've been there, done that. Also, decide if you're a manager or an entrepreneur. If you're a manager you can stay with that business and help it grow. If you're an entrepreneur, you need to find a manager. Then you should move on, enjoy yourself and then set up your next enterprise.
You must either stay ahead of other people, or stay ahead of yourself, all the time. If you really put your mind to it you are normally going to find a better way.
You have to keep questioning the way people do things.
Many people reading this will be affluent. If you don't feel affluent right now, take a minute and think: the very fact that you could afford to link up to the internet, read this off a screen - the very fact that you are able to read at all - marks you out as one of world history's richest and most privileged people.
There's not that many of us, and we haven't been affluent for very long, and so we're not very good at it yet. Affluence makes us lazy. It makes us complacent. It smothers us in cotton wool. If your job's well paid, who can blame you if you're not willing to take a rik and, say, set up your own company?
The vast majority are very happy with this arrangement, and good for them.
But if you want swashbuckling action in your life, become an entrepreneur and give it a go.
Learn the art of trying to set up your own business.
Which is the same as saying, learn the art of making mistakes and learning lessons.
Because if you want to be an entrepreneur and you don't make a few errors along the way, you certainly aren't going to learn anything or achieve very much.
People have a fear of failure and while this is perfectly reasonable, it's also very odd. Because it's through making mistakes that we learn how to do things.
Now there's a limit you may hit, beyond which you can't learn from your mistakes.
Don't expect a chart-topping album from yourself if you're not a singer, or a recital at Carnegie Hall, or a sequence of sonnets or any of the billion and one other things you are never going to be great at.
But that's not failure.
That's finding out what you're good at.
Failure is not giving things a go in the first place.
People who fail are those who don't have a go and don't make an effort.
Failures can't be bothered.
There are few people who've tried something and fallen who didn't get enormous satisfaction from trying, and there's more to learn from people who have tried and faltered than from the few charmed people for whom success came easy.
Social Responsibility
Good small solutions are like gold dust as it's often possible to scale them up, or replicate them manyfold, so that they may acquire a global influence. Muhammad Yunus's Grameen Bank is a classic example.
Don't let relative scale put you off your goals.
Think realistically and creatively about what you can achieve.
No one is asking you to save the planet.
Just dream up and work on a couple of good ideas.
No one expects you to find a global solution to everything.
Just make a difference where you can.
Local solutions have a value in themselves, and some can be scaled up, so it doesn't matter how modest your budget, you can and will make a difference.
Epilogue
In entrepreneurial business, a conservative mindset will hamstring you, defensiveness will weaken you and a failure to face facts will kill you.
Entrepreneurial business favours the open mind.
It favours people whose optimism drives them to prepare for many possible futures, pretty much purely for the joy of doing so.
It favours people whose optimism drives them to prepare for many possible futures, pretty much purely for the joy of doing so.
It favours people with a humane and engaged view of the world; people who can imagine themselves into the skin of their customers, their workers and the people who are affected by their operations.
Business favours people who, when they see a problem or an injustice, try to do something about it.
It favours pragmatists over perfectionists, adventurers over fantasists.
Done well and in the right spirit, business will also bring you success - whatever that is.
When we talk about success, what are we really talking about?
Are we talking about money?
As a measure of success, money's a crude one at best.
People are always inquisitive about how wealthy other people are.
It's a fascinating subject and one that produces endless reams of copy and discussion.
But the reality is that wealth is like a running stream of water.
During some seasons the flow of money is a torrent and you're inundated with cash.
The next moment, you've put money in to develop a business and your cash flow dries up overnight.
If money's a poor guide to success in life, celebrity is worse.
The media likes to personalise and simplify matters. It's much easier to talk about Steve Jobs at Apple, Bill Gates at Microsoft or Warren Buffet at Berkshire Hathaway, but that doesn't really acknowledge that there's a legion of senior people doing significant jobs and making major decisions every day.
Success for me is whether you have created something that you can be really proud of.
Profits are necessary to invest in the next project - pay the bills, repay investors, reward all the hard work - but that's all.
Nobody should be remembered by how much money they have made in life.
Whether you die with a billion dollars in your bank account or $20 under your pillow is actually not that interesting.
That's not what you've achieved in life.
What matters is whether you've created something special - and whether you've made a real difference to other people's lives.
Entrepreneurs, scientists and artists who died as paupers are often the heroes.
Successful people aren't in possession of secrets only known to themselves.
Don't obsess over people who appear to you to be 'winners', but listen instead to the wisdom of people who've led enriching lives - people, for instance, who've found time for friends and family.
Be generous in your interpretation of what success looks like.
In business, as in life, all that matters is that you do something positive.
Thanks for reading - and enjoy your life.
You only get one.
- Richard Branson
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