Community. A friend started a real estate brokerage a few years ago. By the time she’d added her second employee, she was a pillar of her 35,000-person community.
Become a “learning organization”. Shuck your arrogance – “if it isn’t our idea, it can’t be that good” – and become a determined copycat/ adapter/ enhancer.
The workplace revolution that transformed the lives of blue-collar workers in the 1970s and 1980s is finally reaching the offices and cubicles of the white-collar workers.
Divas do it, golfers do it, pilots do it, violists do it, sprinters do it, soldiers do it, surgeons do it, astronauts do it…only business people think it isn’t necessary to train.
But there’s no substitute for getting smarter faster. And the way you get smarter is to screw around vigorously. Try stuff. See what works. See what fails miserably. Learn. Rinse. Repeat.
Be guided by the axiom: There are no limits to the ability to contribute on the part of a properly selected, well-trained, appropriately supported, and, above all, committed person.
The best kept secret in the global economy today is this: When your service is AWESOME you get so stinking rich you have to buy new bags to carry all the money home.
A vibrant, rich, growing corpus of public-domain books is a vital public good – similar to parks, the infrastructure of basic services, and other hallmarks of any advanced society.
Develop a respect and reverence for the principle of variation: the idea that the message ain’t in the mean, the mode or the median – it’s in the differences that occur throughout a population.
