There’s a conspiracy of misinformation and half truths, one of them is the quote: “It’s not about you, it’s about the people that you choose to surround yourself with”. I believe consultants must have come up with this quote. It’s not wrong, it’s just that it is a 1/2 truth, for TWO main reasons:
- Finding, convincing to join and retain top-notch employees & consultants is a rare skill and
- Guiding these employees and consultant to follow the plan within the vision, and the guidelines is no small feat
Therefore, it is all about you, but not in a selfish way. Bill Gates surrounded himself of MVP (most valuable people), but he was the one with the vision, he saw what nobody else (who could execute) could see, and he sold to the team the concept to give 100% toward his vision. Sure he listened to everyone worth listening to along the way, incorporated thoughts and ideas into his own thoughts and ideas.
How does this affect you as the entrepreneur? It does, in many ways:
- The journey and the communication starts within you: not only WHAT you do, nor HOW you do it, but the essence of WHY you do it. Steve Job wanted to free people from using user unfriendly computers. Have you discovered the WHY you are an entrepreneur? is it only money?
- If it’s just money, that is the WHY and the WHO that will be the driving force of the business, that will determine the hiring that you will be doing (more WHO), your management style as well as theirs (HOW), the corporate culture of the company (HOW), the language and vocabulary that will show up over and over in emails, memos, web site copy, marketing collateral, and conversations (HOW).
- Strategy. Got a strategy to fulfill the vision, and a plan to achieve it. And if you don’t . . . that’s also a strategy, whether it is valid or invalid the point is mute, since it is part of the WHO you are. It would not be Debbie Fields, that Debbie that sold Mrs Fields Inc. for $800 million. Debbie said “if you don’t plan, plan on failing”.
Who are you? Who is the “WHO” reading this? If you are a successful entrepreneur and you are reading this, you already have your WHAT->HOW->WHO->WHY aligned. If your company is not doing well and you believe you’ve given it enough time to mature, and it is still not working, you are in trouble: you’ve got your WHAT (your company products / services), you’ve got your HOW in place (brand, corporate culture, marketing, story, etc.), which are the product of a WHY that is not supporting the WHAT and the HOW, because it never went into realizing the WHO, which is you. What is your passion, what makes you tick, what makes you wake up at 5:00 AM before the alarm goes off, jump out of bed looking forward to work. Is it really work if you love it so much?
If you are an entrepreneur in the making you are in the best position, like a painter with a blank canvass you can paint any picture you want, you get to pick the theme, colors, tone, mood, and you can even cut the canvass Lucio Fontana’s style, and declare to the world that it is indeed a sculpture, not a painting. As an entrepreneur in the making, you don’t even have a canvass, you can go into any art form and medium of your choosing, and you can even make up your own art form or medium, and break all the rules there are and make then your own, John Cage did.
And business is indeed the outmost form of self expression: think Steve Job and Apple, and how the iPod and iPhone is shaping and enhancing people’s lives, that is Art indeed.
WHO are you? What’s your art? What’s your voice? What’s your story? What’s your BRAND? Trutfully and congruently answer those questions to yourself, and that is just the beginning, the base for discovering the WHY, your WHY to entrepreneurship, which will lead to the HOW of doing things, which is going to be your own, and your own only style. From there it is a natural progress to build the WHAT, the vehicle that will carry forward your vision, the healthy WHO in the link WHO->WHY->HOW->WHAT.
You’ve got friends: Jackson, Walt, Paul, Ben & Jerry, Debbi.
- Concetto Spaziale 1959 Painting by Lucio Fontana
