Thursday 28 March 2013
5 ways to improve your will power...
A lovely post by Nadia Goodman - which ironically I have lost focus on a few times due to client demands and phone calls from others :)
But is willpower about focus or different things? I don't know.... this is what she has to say... (I add bits in in brackets)
"Think of the last time you struggled to focus on a boring or difficult task. Your wandering attention probably felt like it was outside your control, as if you suddenly lost the ability to focus and didn't know how to regain it. We all feel that way sometimes.
Even in those moments, when you feel like you're fighting against your own instincts, you can stop procrastinating and get focused. You just need to recharge your willpower.
"Willpower gives you the energy and endurance to deal with challenges, the ability to persevere in the face of setbacks, and the strength to tolerate conflict or stress that might otherwise make us run away from goals or projects we care about," says Kelly McGonigal, a Stanford psychologist and author of The Willpower Instinct (Avery, 2011).
Your willpower works like a muscle -- it needs to be trained, developed, and maintained. "A lot of people will tell me they have no willpower," McGonigal says. "But nothing I've come across suggests a willpower gene."
Anyone can learn to improve their willpower, so here are five tips to get you started:
1. Remember your goals.
If your willpower feels drained, think of the task at hand as a necessary stepping stone to help you achieve your goals. "Willpower is very easily depleted if its disconnected from your values and goals," McGonigal says.
For example, if you dislike invoicing, then viewing it as an isolated task will make it hard to muster the energy to do it. If you recast it as one of the many ways you build a thriving business, then the passion you feel for your business will help motivate you to focus on -- and even enjoy -- the invoicing.
(I have tried this it really didn't work for me until I used Kashflow and now, I kinda like it, but would outsource it again tomorrow if I could)
2. Practice coping with stress.
When you're working toward a goal, you are bound to hit tough times. To reach ambitious goals, you need to persist in stressful conditions, even when anxiety, fear, or even boredom threaten to sap your willpower.
Mindfulness helps you cope with stress and strengthen willpower. Try mindfulness meditation, or better yet, do hot yoga to learn to stay with discomfort and find some serenity within it. "It's almost like a willpower workout," McGonigal says.
(Am going to try this as a couple of people I really relate to do it and love it....)
3. Forgive your mistakes.
You are bound to make mistakes, but your willpower will be stronger if you take those errors in stride. "Forgiving yourself for your mistakes increases motivation and engagement with goals," McGonigal says.
Treat your own failure with the kindness you'd offer a friend, but note the ways that you can do a better job next time. "That's very different than the usual self-criticism or ego-boosting," McGonigal says. It allows you to bounce back and grow at the same time.
(Love this one and have learnt much from this.... and relaxed a bit when putting bad ideas to sleep...)
4. Connect with colleagues.
Willpower naturally rises when we feel recognized and appreciated for our work. "We think of willpower as being so tough and individual, but the more connected people feel, the more willpower they have," McGonigal says.
When you feel unmotivated or distracted, go talk to a co-worker or invite your colleagues to lunch. The simple pleasure of working with people you care about toward a common goal is a surprisingly effective way to restore your willpower.
(Strangely enough as often working alone - this is one I really am having to do more and more. And even online, a quick conversation in twitter and linkedin - rather than posting stuff all the time- can do wonders. I recently resend out invitations to linkedin for old clients and attendees of workshops and got a lovely number of replies and comments and inspiration from all the kind words - even from people who haven't seen me train live for years!)
5. Trust that it will get easier. We often struggle to stay engaged during difficult tasks because we imagine, sometimes unconsciously, that they will continue to be just as hard in the future. We feel defeated or hopeless and give up.
To combat that feeling, remember that your skill improves with practice. "Appreciate that a task is difficult but don't tell yourself the story that it's always going to be difficult," McGonigal says. Most likely, the task will be a little bit easier every time you try it.
Read more: http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/226017#ixzz2Oq3RJEeU
(Which is why I joined Lumousity last week - a mobile game that helps with mind powers...)
Monday 25 March 2013
10 lessons learnt by Vincent van Leeuwen - I liked them
1. Pursue your passions: Start with the why
One of the things I found most valuable from participating in the Founder Institute was a lesson about the Golden Circle by Simon Sinek. The golden circle argues that most people and organizations know what they do for a living. A large part of them also knows how they are doing it. But only a select group of people know the exact why behind what they are doing.
Especially in entrepreneurship, I believe this last part is fundamental. The first years of entrepreneurial struggle for me were often a bizarre roller coaster. Sure, I earned a few successes, but against those stood far more failures. Of course these failures are essential for learning in the long run. But in the short run, they give you worry and sleepless nights. Especially during some of these difficult hours, the golden circle has been of tremendous value for me: I always exactly knew why I was going through all this trouble.
2. Learn from the masters
Starting a journey without knowing the path is unwise. Not listening to experts who walked the path before you is foolish. When I started out after attending Startup Weekend, I was a complete idiot. I was the typical university graduate who “knew his shit” about Business Administration, which is not very useful in a startup. I couldn’t write a single line of code, and I didn’t have any clue how to start a business. Luckily for me, I found some books that enlightened my path.
Four books helped me out a lot over the last few years: Four Steps to the Epiphany by Steve Blank, Running Lean by Ash Maurya, The Four Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferris and Rework by Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson. For me, these books were great guides. I still didn’t know how to walk the path, but at least they showed me what it looked like. Up until today, I consider all four a must-read for any entrepreneur or anyone looking into entrepreneurship.
3. Life starts at the end of your comfort zone
Every now and then I run into them. We all know these people, most often working at large corporates or even the government. People who constantly whine about the great ideas they had, years and years before the rest, but “just never pursued them because it was the wrong time”.
These people taught me a great lesson. They are all just making up lame excuses for not trying. People told me it was impossible to have our product launch featured on one of the top tech blogs without spending $3,000 on some fancy PR agency. It wasn’t.
They told me it was impossible to pick up coding. Nowadays I’m not a great coder, but in 12 months I learned how to rock in HTML/CSS, JS & Python. Back in 1994, when Jeff Bezos started Amazon, he had to raise money from 22(!) investors. Any investor who knew anything about books, didn’t invest. They probably thought it was the wrong time too. Screw the haters. Don’t let anyone tell you that something can’t be done.
“Losers always whine about their best. Winners go home and fuck the prom queen.”
- Sean Connery, The Rock
4. Screw exaggerating optimists
You’ve probably heard them far too often bragging about how close they are to signing customer X, who happens to be a publicly listed NASDAQ company. Or a million dollar investment that’s just around the corner from a well-known VC fund.
I have encountered a few of these people and before too soon, I started asking myself what the hell I had been doing with the past few months of my life. Why weren’t we making such progress? Don’t feel bad about yourself because of these kind of people. When I encounter them, I divide their progress by half. Take 50% of their accomplishments and subtract their biggest client from this. This is usually where they really stand.
5. Don’t waste money on legal fuzz you can do yourself
One of the biggest mistakes I made was flushing about $10,000 down the toilet on legal fees for a piece of paper that eventually didn’t suffice when two of our co-founders left the building. This was an important lesson for me. With our first clients, we needed legal documents again to describe terms and conditions. This time, I asked around for some examples, and wound up writing all of our terms and conditions myself. So far, they’ve passed the legal department of our customers without any problems.
Of course you’ll need someone with proper legal background to look at certain things, but don’t think you can’t do anything yourself. As a kid, I thought that the grown-up world my parents lived in would be a completely rational world. The older I’ve gotten, the more I’ve come to realize: It’s not. Take advantage of this.
6. Keep your funding round short
I know this is, of course, easier said than done. We have the coolest angel investors in the world, but still our seed funding round (which was not even astronomically big) took us about six months to arrange. Most of this time was wasted on going back and forth between our lawyer and investor and discussing all kind of legal matters involving highly unlikely scenarios. I found this a real waste of time and energy. Especially because I could have used this time on marketing, sales and customer development, and actually helped our business move forward.
Don’t be like us and ask other entrepreneurs for advice so you can overcome obvious pitfalls. Go for a convertible notes/equity and save the legal nightmares for when you actually have proven that you’ve got a credible business model.
A perfect story from the Netherlands in my opinion: Favour.it secured their seed round in only 2 months. They could then quickly move on to more important matters. That’s how fundraising should be done.
7. Treat the media as your friend
Before we made our first euros, we’d been featured on The Next Web, Financial Times and on VentureBeat. In addition, we’d been broadcasted on the largest television show here in the Netherlands. Of course the media has their own reasons for doing so, but still, it surprised me how much the media helped us to create social proof for our business. This is especially invaluable when you’re just starting out and don’t have any clients yet. Much more valuable than I would ever have believed.
8. Mind the overlap
One of the darkest moments as an entrepreneur for me was to have co-founders leave the company. The biggest reason for this exodus was the overlap in skillset between some of us. This created overhead in thought, communication and negotiation. This happens especially when there’s no clear division of roles.
This overhead resulted in slow decision-making and endless meetings. Needless to say, this is a killer for your business. It’s startup life. Decisions are never perfect. Making decisions is in itself already making progress, and the overlap is not helping out.
The lesson I learned from this is to really think through your team composition. I was foolish to believe that things like overlap between founders would work itself out along the way.
It won’t.
When you’re starting a company and considering a 3rd or 4th founder, take an extra pass at considering why you’re asking this person to join. Is he or she helping you accelerate value creation in the phase your startup is in? Or is he or she more likely to create overhead and overlap in thought and action instead?
9. Learn to code
This is only relevant for non-technical founders like myself. This has been one of my most important lessons. I didn’t write a single line of code until 12 months ago. I taught myself to code and, although it has been scary at times, it has given me much more than I expected.
Please note that you don’t need to become the CTO of your own company as a non-technical founder. I believe that picking up programming should be to acquaint yourself with the particular challenges of engineering. You will find that it will help considerably to understand the technical people you’re working with.
10. You’re not alone
The most encouraging lesson of all has been the awesome community that exists around startups. Whether it’s at Startup Weekend, Hackers & Founders, Pitchrs or Lean Startup Machine, all these events point to the same lesson: You’re not alone. I have been amazed how much people are willing to share, help and collaborate. I found it unbelievable how many Meetups there are, even in a small country like the Netherlands.
And next to the community that is around you, there’s a whole world out there that seems to know exactly what you go through. These articles by great entrepreneurs are never far away at times when you’re unable to see the forest for the trees. Whether it’s Michael Arrington comparing entrepreneurs to pirates, Ben Horowitz describing the Struggle or Pete Ford applauding frighteningly ambitious startup ideas: Moral support is never far away.
In conclusion…
Those are some of the important lessons I’ve learned over the past two years. I’m still the fool I once was, but I believe I’ve become somewhat less foolish every day since. One of the biggest breakthroughs for me came very quickly: to let go of what the outside world thought and expected of me.
Actually, not caring about the expectations of others has probably been the best decision in my life. Why bother worrying about something that you can’t control anyway? Except for what those people really close to you think, I believe it’s probably the least interesting thing in the world.
Of course, not all my fears from 2010 have disappeared. Every now and then, I’m still doubtful of what the future might bring. I still haven’t made any use of my precious uni degrees, which feels like a waste (although I believe it doesn’t hurt to have them). In addition, I have a gap on my resume the size of a black hole, and my personal finances are still a nightmare. I just sent a Facebook message out to some of my best friends (who all work at large corporates) that I will be passing on a skiing trip yet again this year due to lack of funds.
But every now and then I wonder: What if I could go back to 2010? Would I take that red pill again? Would I want to stay in Wonderland, and see how deep the rabbit hole goes?
I’d do it time and time again.
THIS BLOG WAS NOT WRITTEN BY DAN SODERGREN and it doesnt really have anything to do with marketing - this is the original article - by Vincent.
One of the things I found most valuable from participating in the Founder Institute was a lesson about the Golden Circle by Simon Sinek. The golden circle argues that most people and organizations know what they do for a living. A large part of them also knows how they are doing it. But only a select group of people know the exact why behind what they are doing.
Especially in entrepreneurship, I believe this last part is fundamental. The first years of entrepreneurial struggle for me were often a bizarre roller coaster. Sure, I earned a few successes, but against those stood far more failures. Of course these failures are essential for learning in the long run. But in the short run, they give you worry and sleepless nights. Especially during some of these difficult hours, the golden circle has been of tremendous value for me: I always exactly knew why I was going through all this trouble.
2. Learn from the masters
Starting a journey without knowing the path is unwise. Not listening to experts who walked the path before you is foolish. When I started out after attending Startup Weekend, I was a complete idiot. I was the typical university graduate who “knew his shit” about Business Administration, which is not very useful in a startup. I couldn’t write a single line of code, and I didn’t have any clue how to start a business. Luckily for me, I found some books that enlightened my path.
Four books helped me out a lot over the last few years: Four Steps to the Epiphany by Steve Blank, Running Lean by Ash Maurya, The Four Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferris and Rework by Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson. For me, these books were great guides. I still didn’t know how to walk the path, but at least they showed me what it looked like. Up until today, I consider all four a must-read for any entrepreneur or anyone looking into entrepreneurship.
3. Life starts at the end of your comfort zone
Every now and then I run into them. We all know these people, most often working at large corporates or even the government. People who constantly whine about the great ideas they had, years and years before the rest, but “just never pursued them because it was the wrong time”.
These people taught me a great lesson. They are all just making up lame excuses for not trying. People told me it was impossible to have our product launch featured on one of the top tech blogs without spending $3,000 on some fancy PR agency. It wasn’t.
They told me it was impossible to pick up coding. Nowadays I’m not a great coder, but in 12 months I learned how to rock in HTML/CSS, JS & Python. Back in 1994, when Jeff Bezos started Amazon, he had to raise money from 22(!) investors. Any investor who knew anything about books, didn’t invest. They probably thought it was the wrong time too. Screw the haters. Don’t let anyone tell you that something can’t be done.
“Losers always whine about their best. Winners go home and fuck the prom queen.”
- Sean Connery, The Rock
4. Screw exaggerating optimists
You’ve probably heard them far too often bragging about how close they are to signing customer X, who happens to be a publicly listed NASDAQ company. Or a million dollar investment that’s just around the corner from a well-known VC fund.
I have encountered a few of these people and before too soon, I started asking myself what the hell I had been doing with the past few months of my life. Why weren’t we making such progress? Don’t feel bad about yourself because of these kind of people. When I encounter them, I divide their progress by half. Take 50% of their accomplishments and subtract their biggest client from this. This is usually where they really stand.
5. Don’t waste money on legal fuzz you can do yourself
One of the biggest mistakes I made was flushing about $10,000 down the toilet on legal fees for a piece of paper that eventually didn’t suffice when two of our co-founders left the building. This was an important lesson for me. With our first clients, we needed legal documents again to describe terms and conditions. This time, I asked around for some examples, and wound up writing all of our terms and conditions myself. So far, they’ve passed the legal department of our customers without any problems.
Of course you’ll need someone with proper legal background to look at certain things, but don’t think you can’t do anything yourself. As a kid, I thought that the grown-up world my parents lived in would be a completely rational world. The older I’ve gotten, the more I’ve come to realize: It’s not. Take advantage of this.
6. Keep your funding round short
I know this is, of course, easier said than done. We have the coolest angel investors in the world, but still our seed funding round (which was not even astronomically big) took us about six months to arrange. Most of this time was wasted on going back and forth between our lawyer and investor and discussing all kind of legal matters involving highly unlikely scenarios. I found this a real waste of time and energy. Especially because I could have used this time on marketing, sales and customer development, and actually helped our business move forward.
Don’t be like us and ask other entrepreneurs for advice so you can overcome obvious pitfalls. Go for a convertible notes/equity and save the legal nightmares for when you actually have proven that you’ve got a credible business model.
A perfect story from the Netherlands in my opinion: Favour.it secured their seed round in only 2 months. They could then quickly move on to more important matters. That’s how fundraising should be done.
7. Treat the media as your friend
Before we made our first euros, we’d been featured on The Next Web, Financial Times and on VentureBeat. In addition, we’d been broadcasted on the largest television show here in the Netherlands. Of course the media has their own reasons for doing so, but still, it surprised me how much the media helped us to create social proof for our business. This is especially invaluable when you’re just starting out and don’t have any clients yet. Much more valuable than I would ever have believed.
8. Mind the overlap
One of the darkest moments as an entrepreneur for me was to have co-founders leave the company. The biggest reason for this exodus was the overlap in skillset between some of us. This created overhead in thought, communication and negotiation. This happens especially when there’s no clear division of roles.
This overhead resulted in slow decision-making and endless meetings. Needless to say, this is a killer for your business. It’s startup life. Decisions are never perfect. Making decisions is in itself already making progress, and the overlap is not helping out.
The lesson I learned from this is to really think through your team composition. I was foolish to believe that things like overlap between founders would work itself out along the way.
It won’t.
When you’re starting a company and considering a 3rd or 4th founder, take an extra pass at considering why you’re asking this person to join. Is he or she helping you accelerate value creation in the phase your startup is in? Or is he or she more likely to create overhead and overlap in thought and action instead?
9. Learn to code
This is only relevant for non-technical founders like myself. This has been one of my most important lessons. I didn’t write a single line of code until 12 months ago. I taught myself to code and, although it has been scary at times, it has given me much more than I expected.
Please note that you don’t need to become the CTO of your own company as a non-technical founder. I believe that picking up programming should be to acquaint yourself with the particular challenges of engineering. You will find that it will help considerably to understand the technical people you’re working with.
10. You’re not alone
The most encouraging lesson of all has been the awesome community that exists around startups. Whether it’s at Startup Weekend, Hackers & Founders, Pitchrs or Lean Startup Machine, all these events point to the same lesson: You’re not alone. I have been amazed how much people are willing to share, help and collaborate. I found it unbelievable how many Meetups there are, even in a small country like the Netherlands.
And next to the community that is around you, there’s a whole world out there that seems to know exactly what you go through. These articles by great entrepreneurs are never far away at times when you’re unable to see the forest for the trees. Whether it’s Michael Arrington comparing entrepreneurs to pirates, Ben Horowitz describing the Struggle or Pete Ford applauding frighteningly ambitious startup ideas: Moral support is never far away.
In conclusion…
Those are some of the important lessons I’ve learned over the past two years. I’m still the fool I once was, but I believe I’ve become somewhat less foolish every day since. One of the biggest breakthroughs for me came very quickly: to let go of what the outside world thought and expected of me.
Actually, not caring about the expectations of others has probably been the best decision in my life. Why bother worrying about something that you can’t control anyway? Except for what those people really close to you think, I believe it’s probably the least interesting thing in the world.
Of course, not all my fears from 2010 have disappeared. Every now and then, I’m still doubtful of what the future might bring. I still haven’t made any use of my precious uni degrees, which feels like a waste (although I believe it doesn’t hurt to have them). In addition, I have a gap on my resume the size of a black hole, and my personal finances are still a nightmare. I just sent a Facebook message out to some of my best friends (who all work at large corporates) that I will be passing on a skiing trip yet again this year due to lack of funds.
But every now and then I wonder: What if I could go back to 2010? Would I take that red pill again? Would I want to stay in Wonderland, and see how deep the rabbit hole goes?
I’d do it time and time again.
THIS BLOG WAS NOT WRITTEN BY DAN SODERGREN and it doesnt really have anything to do with marketing - this is the original article - by Vincent.
Saturday 23 March 2013
A great post about which investors might invest in you and when
Someone who is a LOT wiser than me in such ways - blogged the below - and so I pop it here to remind me.
I get asked a lot by founders which investors might invest in their startups (as I'm sure most investors do).
There are two sides to the answer.
The first side is what investors are right for you? I'm not going to cover that side in detail here because it is a big topic and I want to cover the other side, but know that side is just as important. You want people that can help you but also that you really want to work with for many years.
The second side -- which investors will actually invest in you -- depends on your traction.
Traction is of course in the eye of the beholder (and that's one problem with using the word itself). Generally speaking though, the more sustainable growth of engaged users/customers you have, and eventually the more sustainable growth of revenue/earnings you have, the more investors will be willing to invest in you.
The smaller your perceived traction the more you have to focus on investors that would invest in your idea and team. OK, so who is that?
When you're just starting out and have just an idea on a napkin, you're really asking people to invest in your team. There is so much risk in the execution of your idea (which may likely change dramatically) that investors are more making a bet on you personally.
There are currently two groups of investors that regularly invest only in teams:
1) Friends and family; in other words, people that really know you. I'm surprised how little I see founders take friends and family money (including their own money). It actually sends a very positive signal to the next series of investors even if it is a smallish sum of money, say 20K. You had enough conviction to put in your own money and put your reputation on the line with your family.
2) Accelerators. There is one or more in almost every major city now. This relatively new funding source dramatically opened up early money to teams, but you generally can't get too far on it alone.
A third category is also emerging in crowd funding.
After you get your team moving and have started actually building something (but don't have any real traction yet), you open up the investor universe just a little bit further to include investors who really buy into your idea.
Who is that?
Those are people who generally have deep expertise into what you're trying to disrupt. Look for investors that invested in the same general technology area (e.g. search) or previously sold a company similar to yours.
It is very hard to to convince investors when you have no traction. Your story itself is either going to click or it isn't, and it is much much more likely to click if the investor deeply knows the background to what you're doing already. Think about it. If the investor doesn't have the knowledge to see the obvious disruption that you see then they'll have to educate themselves on all that background knowledge to get to the same point you are.
Once you have some traction, the universe opens up further. But even with a lot of traction the universe of investors that will actually invest in you is still small.
Investors have investing theses -- these can include a whole host of factors like geography, market size, technology area, valuation, amount invested, ownership requirements, control requirements, etc. When you match your company to these investing theses, most investors get excluded even for companies that have a decent amount of traction.
Luckily the investing theses are pretty well-known. A quick proxy is to look at companies an investor has already invested in; that is, their portfolio. If these seem to match you then you're probably in the right area.
Another way to look at this whole question is risk. When you start out you have a lot of risks in different areas, e.g. team, technical, market, financing, etc.
As you de-risk these areas with actual traction, more investors will want to invest in you simply because the deal is less risky. You also get valuation bumps as a result.
Your friends and family don't need traction to de-risk the team because they already know you. Knowledgeable investors (in your specific area) need less traction to de-risk technical and market risk because they already know your area.
As a corollary, if you're out raising money and people think you're crazy, you don't have enough traction yet to be talking to those people.
The main takeaway is to make sure you are focusing your efforts on raising money from the investors that might actually invest in you.
Thursday 21 March 2013
You have to focus - not doing so is the #1 mistake entreprenuers make...
Someone a lot wiser than I (Michael Lazerow - who has $2 billion worth of company exits to his name) said the above and wrote the below article - and for the life of me - it's one of the hardest things I find almost impossible to do.
Which is why I am going to have to take up light yoga somewhere and learn how to quieten down my mind. And .... FOCUS.
As Michael tells us - I’ve started 4 companies and have invested in 25 more. And I can say, with supreme confidence, that I have made or seen almost every mistake possible.
I’ve hired the wrong people. And fired the wrong people.
I’ve raised too much money (yes, it’s possible). And too little.
I’ve launched products that not one person used and have pivoted so many times I’m still dizzy.
None of these are fun to live through, I assure you. But they are not nearly as fatal to a young company as the #1 mistake entrepreneurs make – FOCUSING ON THE WRONG THINGS.
Successful entrepreneurs focus exclusively on efforts that matter and are able to tune out the rest. People who focus succeed. It’s that simple.
A critical difference between a startup and a large company is resources. Specifically, time and money. And having little of both is oftentimes a godsend and leads to some of our best work. Just look at your favorite indie movie!
Google can give its employees 20 percent of their time to pursue their crazy ideas. If Buddy Media had done that, we would have been out of business.
Focusing is not a natural exercise for many entrepreneurs. More ideas pop into my brain during my morning shower than many people get in a month.
So in order to focus, you need to build your “focus” muscle and train your brain to focus and stay focused.
Volumes have been written about how to do just this. One of my favorites is “Organize Your Mind, Organize Your Life: Train Your Brain to Get More Done in Less Time” by Dr. Paul Hammerness, a Harvard Medical School psychiatrist and Margaret Moore, an executive wellness coach and codirector of the Institute of Coaching.
But you don’t need to read books to bring focus to your entrepreneurial life. Here is an exercise I use with entrepreneurs I have invested in to make sure they are truly focusing on the right things.
I ask a very simple question: What are the top 3 things you need to accomplish in the next 6-12 months to give the company the best chance of long-term success?
I push them to be specific. And rank the responses in order of importance.
Is creating the best product most important? How about locking down distribution? Are those both more important than monetization? How about hiring the right people? How about raising money? Is business development important to the business this year?
Most entrepreneurs I speak to can’t name their priorities right away. And if they can, they aren’t written down anywhere and they haven’t been communicated to the rest of their organization.
If an entrepreneur can’t name their top 3 priorities without hesitation, how will the rest of the company know? It’s bad enough for an founder to work on the wrong projects. But if the entire company is not focusing in the right areas, game over!
Without focus, young companies can FEEL like they are accomplishing a lot while in reality accomplishing nothing. They solve problems that never existed in the first place. And launch products with no market.
With the right focus, entrepreneurs can change the world. I’ve seen it so many times, upclose and personal.
If Mark Zuckerberg had not focused on the photo-tagging feature years ago, Facebook would not be the world-changing company it is. If Twitter had not focused on 140 character messaging, it would never have survived. Where would Apple be if it decided to focus on watches instead of phones? Or if it focused on selling the most number of units rather than designing the best products and profitability? You get the idea.
The single most focused entrepreneur I have ever met is Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce. He has an epic and well-documented process and tool called the V2Mom that has helped him build Salesforce into Forbes’ most innovative company in the world (two years in a row!).
In one of my first meetings with Marc, he told me that everything he has written down over the past 14 years has come true. Does he have a secret genie granting him wishes? No. But he has been able to get his entire company focused on core priorities over and over again.
I encourage all leaders (of companies, of divisions and of small teams) to write down the top 3 areas of focus somewhere visible in the organization and communicate them to the entire team.
By doing so, you are not only able to focus on what is most important, but you are also able to eliminate distractions, which is the biggest gift you can give as a leader.
Which is why I am going to have to take up light yoga somewhere and learn how to quieten down my mind. And .... FOCUS.
As Michael tells us - I’ve started 4 companies and have invested in 25 more. And I can say, with supreme confidence, that I have made or seen almost every mistake possible.
I’ve hired the wrong people. And fired the wrong people.
I’ve raised too much money (yes, it’s possible). And too little.
I’ve launched products that not one person used and have pivoted so many times I’m still dizzy.
None of these are fun to live through, I assure you. But they are not nearly as fatal to a young company as the #1 mistake entrepreneurs make – FOCUSING ON THE WRONG THINGS.
Successful entrepreneurs focus exclusively on efforts that matter and are able to tune out the rest. People who focus succeed. It’s that simple.
A critical difference between a startup and a large company is resources. Specifically, time and money. And having little of both is oftentimes a godsend and leads to some of our best work. Just look at your favorite indie movie!
Google can give its employees 20 percent of their time to pursue their crazy ideas. If Buddy Media had done that, we would have been out of business.
Focusing is not a natural exercise for many entrepreneurs. More ideas pop into my brain during my morning shower than many people get in a month.
So in order to focus, you need to build your “focus” muscle and train your brain to focus and stay focused.
Volumes have been written about how to do just this. One of my favorites is “Organize Your Mind, Organize Your Life: Train Your Brain to Get More Done in Less Time” by Dr. Paul Hammerness, a Harvard Medical School psychiatrist and Margaret Moore, an executive wellness coach and codirector of the Institute of Coaching.
But you don’t need to read books to bring focus to your entrepreneurial life. Here is an exercise I use with entrepreneurs I have invested in to make sure they are truly focusing on the right things.
I ask a very simple question: What are the top 3 things you need to accomplish in the next 6-12 months to give the company the best chance of long-term success?
I push them to be specific. And rank the responses in order of importance.
Is creating the best product most important? How about locking down distribution? Are those both more important than monetization? How about hiring the right people? How about raising money? Is business development important to the business this year?
Most entrepreneurs I speak to can’t name their priorities right away. And if they can, they aren’t written down anywhere and they haven’t been communicated to the rest of their organization.
If an entrepreneur can’t name their top 3 priorities without hesitation, how will the rest of the company know? It’s bad enough for an founder to work on the wrong projects. But if the entire company is not focusing in the right areas, game over!
Without focus, young companies can FEEL like they are accomplishing a lot while in reality accomplishing nothing. They solve problems that never existed in the first place. And launch products with no market.
With the right focus, entrepreneurs can change the world. I’ve seen it so many times, upclose and personal.
If Mark Zuckerberg had not focused on the photo-tagging feature years ago, Facebook would not be the world-changing company it is. If Twitter had not focused on 140 character messaging, it would never have survived. Where would Apple be if it decided to focus on watches instead of phones? Or if it focused on selling the most number of units rather than designing the best products and profitability? You get the idea.
The single most focused entrepreneur I have ever met is Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce. He has an epic and well-documented process and tool called the V2Mom that has helped him build Salesforce into Forbes’ most innovative company in the world (two years in a row!).
In one of my first meetings with Marc, he told me that everything he has written down over the past 14 years has come true. Does he have a secret genie granting him wishes? No. But he has been able to get his entire company focused on core priorities over and over again.
I encourage all leaders (of companies, of divisions and of small teams) to write down the top 3 areas of focus somewhere visible in the organization and communicate them to the entire team.
By doing so, you are not only able to focus on what is most important, but you are also able to eliminate distractions, which is the biggest gift you can give as a leader.
Monday 11 March 2013
Meet Amancio Ortega: The third-richest man in the world
After Gates and Slim comes Amancio Ortega, who built the world's largest fashion empire, Zara. He's difficult to know, impossible to interview, and incredibly secretive. An exclusive portrait....................by Vivienne Walt in Fortune
Sometimes an idea comes to you - and slips perfectly into a new business. I won't say that this is the same as below but its kinda cool so I don't want to forget it - so I pop it here for safe keeping...
Meet Mr Gaona and like Mr Ford he will change industries forever, and hopefully my life too. Let me explain...
The motorbike roared up to the traffic light in La Coruña in northern Spain and stopped alongside a black Town Car. From inside, the passenger glanced out his window and saw the young biker leaning over the handlebars, jean jacket decorated with appliquéd patches, a throwback to the 1970s. The man in the car, decades older than the biker, zoomed in on the jacket. The old man grabbed his cellphone and, as the story goes, called an aide in his office. His eyes still fixed on the biker, the man described the jacket's stitching, its shape and color, and signed off with a single instruction: "¡Hácedla!" Make it.
The light turned green, the biker pulled away; unbeknown to him, he and his jacket had just played a walk-on role in one of the greatest retail stories of our time.
Amancio Ortega Gaona -- the man inside the car -- is the third-richest man on earth.
In this provincial corner of Galicia, on Spain's windswept northwestern coastline, the 76-year-old founder of the Inditex Group has spent years secluded from public view, all while living in the middle of La Coruña, a city of 246,000 people. Among the millions of shoppers who patronize Inditex's flagship brand, Zara, and have made Ortega unfathomably rich, few have even heard his name. Ortega has made sure of that, shunning social appearances and refusing all interview requests (including for this article). Until 1999 no photograph of Ortega had ever been published. (Which is sooooo cool it beggars belief.)
And yet, Ortega built a fashion empire that reaches into more than 80 countries. Beginning 40 years ago, Ortega ripped up the business model that had been refined over decades by Europe's fashion houses and replaced it with one of the most brutally fast turnaround schedules the industry had ever attempted. Decades later Zara is the world's biggest fashion retailer.
Ortega built his empire on two basic rules: Give customers what they want, and get it to them faster than anyone else. The twin organizing principles have made the company (and Ortega) into an unlikely iconoclast, more of an optimal supply chain than a traditional retailer. They are also the secret to Inditex's astonishing success. "Very few companies can challenge Inditex at this time. The company is in a race with themselves rather than anything else," says Christodoulos Chaviaras, a retail analyst at Barclays Capital in London. Tadashi Yanai, founder of clothing retailer Uniqlo, has made it his stated goal in life to beat Zara. And last August shares of the fashion company Esprit rose 28% on the day it announced its new CEO, Inditex's former distribution and operations manager.
Spain might be suffering through its worst recession in generations, with 24% unemployment and crippling debt, but within Inditex, the crisis might as well be happening on Mars. "They live in a different world," says Modesto Lomba, president of the Spanish Association of Fashion Designers. In December, CEO Pablo Isla announced that revenue was up 17% year on year for the first three quarters of 2012 -- that nine-month sales revenue amounts to $14.6 billion -- and net profits matched 2010's, at $2.71 billion. So far, the growth shows no signs of slowing.
Inditex produced 835,000 garments in 2011. A new Zara store opens every day, on average; Inditex's 6,000th store just launched on London's Oxford Street. There are 46 Zara stores in the U.S., 347 in China, and 1,938 in Spain. Ortega controls more than 59% of the company's shares, and last July he overtook Warren Buffett to become the world's third-richest man, behind Carlos Slim Helú and Bill Gates. The reclusive, enigmatic Spaniard, hunting for ideas from his car window on the streets of his hometown, is now worth about $56 billion.
If such a fortune seems big, it is even more astonishing when you consider the man himself. The youngest of four children, Ortega was born in Busdongo de Arbas, a hamlet of 60 people in northern Spain, in 1936, just as the Spanish Civil War was erupting. The family scraped by on his father's railway job while his mother worked as a housemaid. When Amancio was a small boy, the family moved to La Coruña. There, home was a row house that abutted the train tracks and that served, as it still does today, as the railway workers' quarters. Amancio might have joined the rail service too, had it not been for one fateful evening when he was just 13. Walking home from his school, he and his mother stopped at a local store, where he stood by as his mother pleaded for credit. "He heard someone say, 'Señora, I cannot give this to you. You have to pay for it,'" says Covadonga O'Shea, a longtime friend of Ortega's who runs a fashion business school at the University of Navarra in Madrid and wrote the sole authorized biography of him, The Man From Zara. "He felt so humiliated, he decided he would never go back to school."
Barely in his teens, Ortega found a job as a shop hand for a local shirtmaker called Gala, which still sits on the same corner in downtown La Coruña. Today the store feels frozen in time: plaid shirts, fishermen's caps, and woolen cardigans. "Can you believe it?" says Xabier R. Blanco, a local journalist who tracks Ortega's career. "They still sell the same stuff, and Amancio is Mr. World." That painful irony is not lost on Gala's owner, José Martínez, 76, who inherited the store from his father.
THIS IS MY FAVOURITE PART OF THE STORY....
José befriended young Amancio when they were both 14. The boys spent their afternoons folding shirts at Gala and riding bikes around town. Martínez does not relish his current role as counterpoint to his childhood friend. "No one ever comes in here to buy anything," he says. "They just want to know about Amancio."
By 16, Ortega had concluded that the real money could be made giving customers exactly what they wanted, quickly, rather than buying up inventory in the hopes it would sell. To do that, he needed to figure out what people were looking for, then make it. He would need to control the supply chain. Ortega had the ideal environment: Galicia. With few job opportunities, thousands of men worked at sea, leaving their women to struggle alone back home. "The women would do anything for a little money, and they were really good at sewing," says Blanco, who co-wrote a book called Amancio Ortega: From Zero to Zara. Ortega began organizing thousands of women into sewing cooperatives. He oversaw a thriving production of quilted bathrobes for his first company, GOA. Mercedes López was 14 when she went to work for Ortega and says most women were thrilled to be hired. "The conditions were really pretty good," says López, now 52, who is the textile union representative at Inditex. "We knew Amancio well. He was very close to the workers." It was a family business: Ortega ran design, his brother Antonio headed the commercial side, and his sister Josefa was the bookkeeper. The company trucked in textiles from Barcelona, cutting out the middlemen.
With enough cash, Ortega opened his first storefront in 1975, two blocks from his teenage job at Gala. He named it Zara, because his preferred name, Zorba, was taken. From the outset, Ortega made speed the driving force. Decades later it still is. Zara stores refresh their stock twice a week and receive orders within 48 hours, tops. Ortega imposed the 48-hour rule in the 1970s, forcing him to open the first Zara stores near La Coruña. Many lined the well-traveled truck route to Barcelona's textile factories. Even as the company grew, Ortega stuck to his two rules.
It took Ortega 10 years to found the holding company, Inditex, and open his first international store in Portugal -- whose labor force, cheaper than Spain's, made it the next obvious place to produce; New York and Paris followed in the late 1980s. While Zara proliferated across Europe through the 1990s, much of the production was kept close to home. "Our roots have always been in manufacturing," says Jesús Echevarria Hernández, Inditex's spokesman, sitting in the company's sprawling headquarters in Arteixo, outside La Coruña, with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking farmland. "When we come here, we always refer to it as 'going to the factory.'"
The factory is part sci-fi machine, part old-fashioned retail -- a well-oiled operation organized around Ortega's twin principles. It is restocking continually at top speed. Inside, its high-gloss, white, minimalist interiors resemble a humongous Zara store. Along two arteries down the main floor, hundreds of designers and sales analysts work at long white counters in a vast open space, grouped around regions of Zara's empire. The pace is frantic: Designers create about three items a day, and patternmakers cut one sample from each. Seated alongside them are commercial-sales specialists, each with regional expertise, who dissect tastes and customer habits using sales reports from Zara store managers to see what's selling and (more telling) what customers are looking for. Staffers say inspiration comes from the streets, clubs, bars, and restaurants. Each is trained to keep an eye on what people are wearing, just as Ortega has done for decades.
At one end of the Zara design floor is a small team that manages Zara.com. There, flat-screen monitors linked by webcam to offices in Shanghai, Tokyo, and New York act as trendspotters, since countries and cities are not monolithic: Tokyo's Ginza district, for example, resembles SoHo in Manhattan more than Tokyo's business district. The obsession for spotting new tastes is pure Ortega. "We never go to fashion shows," says Loreta García, who joined Inditex 23 years ago, straight out of design school, and now heads Zara Woman's trends department. "We track bloggers and listen to customers, but we change our opinions all the time," she says. "What seems great today, in two weeks is the worst idea ever."
What keeps this machine ticking is the logistics department -- "the essence of the company," says Echevarria, who credits the system for such turnaround speeds in places as far-flung as Baku and Melbourne. At 400,000 square feet, the logistics building is more than three times the size of headquarters across the street, and is organized around a Rube Goldberg-style labyrinth of conveyer belts extending five stories high. It delivers customized orders to every Zara store on the planet. There is a firm 24-hour turnaround deadline for Europe, the Middle East, and much of the U.S., and 48 hours for Asia and Latin America.
The unusual arrangement is pure Ortega. Though he officially handed the reins to Pablo Isla in July 2011, Ortega remains the company's muse, inspiration, and biggest shareholder. Astonishingly, Ortega has never had an office. Even now, the world's third-richest man sits at a desk at the end of Zara Woman's open workspace. Ortega prefers touching fabrics to reading memos. "It's as though there are no computers," García says. "The directors are like that too now," she says. "We all started here young and have grown up with Ortega." Newer staff members say they are astonished at how often Ortega discusses colors and trends with them. "You can ask Ortega, 'What do you think of this?' It's very flexible," says García. "You don't have to fix an appointment." Asked what Ortega's legacy will be at Inditex, Isla, the CEO, answered similarly: "The entrepreneurial spirit, the self-criticism, the culture: The company is completely flat."
Ortega's insistence on staying close to home and his ability to connect with even low-level employees raise an intriguing question: Would his executive style have been more hierarchical and conventional -- and perhaps less successful -- had he emerged from a privileged family and with an MBA, rather than from dire poverty with little education? "Poverty clearly made him who he is," says Blanco, who wrote his unauthorized biography. "There was a hunger. Show me any great boxer who didn't come from this kind of background."
In semiretirement, Ortega now lives in a five-story sea-facing house in La Coruña, on a busy city street, with little evident security. He eats breakfast every morning (eggs and fries, say friends) with acquaintances at La Coruña's businessmen's club, and retreats on weekends to his country house, where he raises chickens and goats and gathers his grown children. A creature of habit, Ortega devotes weeks a year to hiking pilgrimage routes in Galicia, and his lifelong aversion to flying keeps him from traveling much. Antonio Grandío Dopico, economics professor at the University of La Coruña, who has known Ortega since Inditex began, says his old friend's life philosophy is "absolute normality."
Yet these are not normal times in Spain. Youths in their twenties -- Zara's key market -- suffer unemployment rates of about 50%, double the national average. The country's economic pain is clear walking through La Coruña. The commercial artery has dozens of boarded-up storefronts. The one bright spot is a renovated building on a prized corner near the port, lit up and humming with action: the city's premier Zara store.
How long can Zara maintain its relentless expansion? With Europe's slowdown, the company expanded in the U.S. and Asia, with a splashy opening on Fifth Avenue last year, and in September launched Zara.com in China. As Zara expands farther from La Coruña, Ortega's rules might collide with the reality of shipping hundreds of thousands of garments a year back to Galicia for distribution.
Zara may change, but the man who built this retail giant will always be, deep down, a small-town hero. Once, when traveling to a store opening in Manhattan, Ortega watched as shoppers poured through the doors. He was so overcome he shut himself in a bathroom and wept. "No one could see the tears streaming down my face," he told O'Shea. "Can you imagine how I thought of my parents then? How proud they would have been of their son who had, so to speak, discovered America, starting from a little town lost in the sticks of northern Spain!"
Sometimes an idea comes to you - and slips perfectly into a new business. I won't say that this is the same as below but its kinda cool so I don't want to forget it - so I pop it here for safe keeping...
Meet Mr Gaona and like Mr Ford he will change industries forever, and hopefully my life too. Let me explain...
The motorbike roared up to the traffic light in La Coruña in northern Spain and stopped alongside a black Town Car. From inside, the passenger glanced out his window and saw the young biker leaning over the handlebars, jean jacket decorated with appliquéd patches, a throwback to the 1970s. The man in the car, decades older than the biker, zoomed in on the jacket. The old man grabbed his cellphone and, as the story goes, called an aide in his office. His eyes still fixed on the biker, the man described the jacket's stitching, its shape and color, and signed off with a single instruction: "¡Hácedla!" Make it.
The light turned green, the biker pulled away; unbeknown to him, he and his jacket had just played a walk-on role in one of the greatest retail stories of our time.
Amancio Ortega Gaona -- the man inside the car -- is the third-richest man on earth.
In this provincial corner of Galicia, on Spain's windswept northwestern coastline, the 76-year-old founder of the Inditex Group has spent years secluded from public view, all while living in the middle of La Coruña, a city of 246,000 people. Among the millions of shoppers who patronize Inditex's flagship brand, Zara, and have made Ortega unfathomably rich, few have even heard his name. Ortega has made sure of that, shunning social appearances and refusing all interview requests (including for this article). Until 1999 no photograph of Ortega had ever been published. (Which is sooooo cool it beggars belief.)
And yet, Ortega built a fashion empire that reaches into more than 80 countries. Beginning 40 years ago, Ortega ripped up the business model that had been refined over decades by Europe's fashion houses and replaced it with one of the most brutally fast turnaround schedules the industry had ever attempted. Decades later Zara is the world's biggest fashion retailer.
Ortega built his empire on two basic rules: Give customers what they want, and get it to them faster than anyone else. The twin organizing principles have made the company (and Ortega) into an unlikely iconoclast, more of an optimal supply chain than a traditional retailer. They are also the secret to Inditex's astonishing success. "Very few companies can challenge Inditex at this time. The company is in a race with themselves rather than anything else," says Christodoulos Chaviaras, a retail analyst at Barclays Capital in London. Tadashi Yanai, founder of clothing retailer Uniqlo, has made it his stated goal in life to beat Zara. And last August shares of the fashion company Esprit rose 28% on the day it announced its new CEO, Inditex's former distribution and operations manager.
Spain might be suffering through its worst recession in generations, with 24% unemployment and crippling debt, but within Inditex, the crisis might as well be happening on Mars. "They live in a different world," says Modesto Lomba, president of the Spanish Association of Fashion Designers. In December, CEO Pablo Isla announced that revenue was up 17% year on year for the first three quarters of 2012 -- that nine-month sales revenue amounts to $14.6 billion -- and net profits matched 2010's, at $2.71 billion. So far, the growth shows no signs of slowing.
Inditex produced 835,000 garments in 2011. A new Zara store opens every day, on average; Inditex's 6,000th store just launched on London's Oxford Street. There are 46 Zara stores in the U.S., 347 in China, and 1,938 in Spain. Ortega controls more than 59% of the company's shares, and last July he overtook Warren Buffett to become the world's third-richest man, behind Carlos Slim Helú and Bill Gates. The reclusive, enigmatic Spaniard, hunting for ideas from his car window on the streets of his hometown, is now worth about $56 billion.
If such a fortune seems big, it is even more astonishing when you consider the man himself. The youngest of four children, Ortega was born in Busdongo de Arbas, a hamlet of 60 people in northern Spain, in 1936, just as the Spanish Civil War was erupting. The family scraped by on his father's railway job while his mother worked as a housemaid. When Amancio was a small boy, the family moved to La Coruña. There, home was a row house that abutted the train tracks and that served, as it still does today, as the railway workers' quarters. Amancio might have joined the rail service too, had it not been for one fateful evening when he was just 13. Walking home from his school, he and his mother stopped at a local store, where he stood by as his mother pleaded for credit. "He heard someone say, 'Señora, I cannot give this to you. You have to pay for it,'" says Covadonga O'Shea, a longtime friend of Ortega's who runs a fashion business school at the University of Navarra in Madrid and wrote the sole authorized biography of him, The Man From Zara. "He felt so humiliated, he decided he would never go back to school."
Barely in his teens, Ortega found a job as a shop hand for a local shirtmaker called Gala, which still sits on the same corner in downtown La Coruña. Today the store feels frozen in time: plaid shirts, fishermen's caps, and woolen cardigans. "Can you believe it?" says Xabier R. Blanco, a local journalist who tracks Ortega's career. "They still sell the same stuff, and Amancio is Mr. World." That painful irony is not lost on Gala's owner, José Martínez, 76, who inherited the store from his father.
THIS IS MY FAVOURITE PART OF THE STORY....
José befriended young Amancio when they were both 14. The boys spent their afternoons folding shirts at Gala and riding bikes around town. Martínez does not relish his current role as counterpoint to his childhood friend. "No one ever comes in here to buy anything," he says. "They just want to know about Amancio."
By 16, Ortega had concluded that the real money could be made giving customers exactly what they wanted, quickly, rather than buying up inventory in the hopes it would sell. To do that, he needed to figure out what people were looking for, then make it. He would need to control the supply chain. Ortega had the ideal environment: Galicia. With few job opportunities, thousands of men worked at sea, leaving their women to struggle alone back home. "The women would do anything for a little money, and they were really good at sewing," says Blanco, who co-wrote a book called Amancio Ortega: From Zero to Zara. Ortega began organizing thousands of women into sewing cooperatives. He oversaw a thriving production of quilted bathrobes for his first company, GOA. Mercedes López was 14 when she went to work for Ortega and says most women were thrilled to be hired. "The conditions were really pretty good," says López, now 52, who is the textile union representative at Inditex. "We knew Amancio well. He was very close to the workers." It was a family business: Ortega ran design, his brother Antonio headed the commercial side, and his sister Josefa was the bookkeeper. The company trucked in textiles from Barcelona, cutting out the middlemen.
With enough cash, Ortega opened his first storefront in 1975, two blocks from his teenage job at Gala. He named it Zara, because his preferred name, Zorba, was taken. From the outset, Ortega made speed the driving force. Decades later it still is. Zara stores refresh their stock twice a week and receive orders within 48 hours, tops. Ortega imposed the 48-hour rule in the 1970s, forcing him to open the first Zara stores near La Coruña. Many lined the well-traveled truck route to Barcelona's textile factories. Even as the company grew, Ortega stuck to his two rules.
It took Ortega 10 years to found the holding company, Inditex, and open his first international store in Portugal -- whose labor force, cheaper than Spain's, made it the next obvious place to produce; New York and Paris followed in the late 1980s. While Zara proliferated across Europe through the 1990s, much of the production was kept close to home. "Our roots have always been in manufacturing," says Jesús Echevarria Hernández, Inditex's spokesman, sitting in the company's sprawling headquarters in Arteixo, outside La Coruña, with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking farmland. "When we come here, we always refer to it as 'going to the factory.'"
The factory is part sci-fi machine, part old-fashioned retail -- a well-oiled operation organized around Ortega's twin principles. It is restocking continually at top speed. Inside, its high-gloss, white, minimalist interiors resemble a humongous Zara store. Along two arteries down the main floor, hundreds of designers and sales analysts work at long white counters in a vast open space, grouped around regions of Zara's empire. The pace is frantic: Designers create about three items a day, and patternmakers cut one sample from each. Seated alongside them are commercial-sales specialists, each with regional expertise, who dissect tastes and customer habits using sales reports from Zara store managers to see what's selling and (more telling) what customers are looking for. Staffers say inspiration comes from the streets, clubs, bars, and restaurants. Each is trained to keep an eye on what people are wearing, just as Ortega has done for decades.
At one end of the Zara design floor is a small team that manages Zara.com. There, flat-screen monitors linked by webcam to offices in Shanghai, Tokyo, and New York act as trendspotters, since countries and cities are not monolithic: Tokyo's Ginza district, for example, resembles SoHo in Manhattan more than Tokyo's business district. The obsession for spotting new tastes is pure Ortega. "We never go to fashion shows," says Loreta García, who joined Inditex 23 years ago, straight out of design school, and now heads Zara Woman's trends department. "We track bloggers and listen to customers, but we change our opinions all the time," she says. "What seems great today, in two weeks is the worst idea ever."
What keeps this machine ticking is the logistics department -- "the essence of the company," says Echevarria, who credits the system for such turnaround speeds in places as far-flung as Baku and Melbourne. At 400,000 square feet, the logistics building is more than three times the size of headquarters across the street, and is organized around a Rube Goldberg-style labyrinth of conveyer belts extending five stories high. It delivers customized orders to every Zara store on the planet. There is a firm 24-hour turnaround deadline for Europe, the Middle East, and much of the U.S., and 48 hours for Asia and Latin America.
The unusual arrangement is pure Ortega. Though he officially handed the reins to Pablo Isla in July 2011, Ortega remains the company's muse, inspiration, and biggest shareholder. Astonishingly, Ortega has never had an office. Even now, the world's third-richest man sits at a desk at the end of Zara Woman's open workspace. Ortega prefers touching fabrics to reading memos. "It's as though there are no computers," García says. "The directors are like that too now," she says. "We all started here young and have grown up with Ortega." Newer staff members say they are astonished at how often Ortega discusses colors and trends with them. "You can ask Ortega, 'What do you think of this?' It's very flexible," says García. "You don't have to fix an appointment." Asked what Ortega's legacy will be at Inditex, Isla, the CEO, answered similarly: "The entrepreneurial spirit, the self-criticism, the culture: The company is completely flat."
Ortega's insistence on staying close to home and his ability to connect with even low-level employees raise an intriguing question: Would his executive style have been more hierarchical and conventional -- and perhaps less successful -- had he emerged from a privileged family and with an MBA, rather than from dire poverty with little education? "Poverty clearly made him who he is," says Blanco, who wrote his unauthorized biography. "There was a hunger. Show me any great boxer who didn't come from this kind of background."
In semiretirement, Ortega now lives in a five-story sea-facing house in La Coruña, on a busy city street, with little evident security. He eats breakfast every morning (eggs and fries, say friends) with acquaintances at La Coruña's businessmen's club, and retreats on weekends to his country house, where he raises chickens and goats and gathers his grown children. A creature of habit, Ortega devotes weeks a year to hiking pilgrimage routes in Galicia, and his lifelong aversion to flying keeps him from traveling much. Antonio Grandío Dopico, economics professor at the University of La Coruña, who has known Ortega since Inditex began, says his old friend's life philosophy is "absolute normality."
Yet these are not normal times in Spain. Youths in their twenties -- Zara's key market -- suffer unemployment rates of about 50%, double the national average. The country's economic pain is clear walking through La Coruña. The commercial artery has dozens of boarded-up storefronts. The one bright spot is a renovated building on a prized corner near the port, lit up and humming with action: the city's premier Zara store.
How long can Zara maintain its relentless expansion? With Europe's slowdown, the company expanded in the U.S. and Asia, with a splashy opening on Fifth Avenue last year, and in September launched Zara.com in China. As Zara expands farther from La Coruña, Ortega's rules might collide with the reality of shipping hundreds of thousands of garments a year back to Galicia for distribution.
Zara may change, but the man who built this retail giant will always be, deep down, a small-town hero. Once, when traveling to a store opening in Manhattan, Ortega watched as shoppers poured through the doors. He was so overcome he shut himself in a bathroom and wept. "No one could see the tears streaming down my face," he told O'Shea. "Can you imagine how I thought of my parents then? How proud they would have been of their son who had, so to speak, discovered America, starting from a little town lost in the sticks of northern Spain!"
My Personality Test - Dan Sodergren aka @ukmarketinghelp
As I stand on the threshold of what might be a new way of my working, a new career choice, a new part of my life, I finally managed to give myself the time to take the Via me free personality test .....
Not only this but after seeing about 20,000 mentions of it on Facebook when working for clients I finally signed up for a Spotify account as well.
Both have been illuminating ;)
The more relevant being my personality test - which showed the following top five traits.
Character Strength # 1 Creativity
Thinking of new ways to do things is a crucial part of who you are. You are never content with doing something the conventional way if a better way is possible.
Character Strength # 2 Humor
You like to laugh and tease. Bringing smiles to other people is important to you. You try to see the light side of all situations.
Character Strength # 3 Zest
Regardless of what you do, you approach it with excitement and energy. You never do anything halfway or halfheartedly. For you, life is an adventure.
Character Strength # 4 Love of learning
You love learning new things, whether in a class or on your own. You have always loved school, reading, and museums-anywhere and everywhere there is an opportunity to learn.
Character Strength # 5 Bravery
You are a courageous person who does not shrink from threat, challenge, difficulty, or pain. You speak up for what is right even if there is opposition. You act on your convictions.
So whether the above is true would be interesting (I did a lot of soul searching and honest answering) but is it, in the end, other people's perceptions which can make you who you become.
We will see ;)
Oh and spotify is interesting as music is truly social, the platform makes the business, and they give you something for nothing, add amazing value, then advertise that they will take away the adverts of their partners as long as you pay them. Genius.
Not only this but after seeing about 20,000 mentions of it on Facebook when working for clients I finally signed up for a Spotify account as well.
Both have been illuminating ;)
The more relevant being my personality test - which showed the following top five traits.
Character Strength # 1 Creativity
Thinking of new ways to do things is a crucial part of who you are. You are never content with doing something the conventional way if a better way is possible.
Character Strength # 2 Humor
You like to laugh and tease. Bringing smiles to other people is important to you. You try to see the light side of all situations.
Character Strength # 3 Zest
Regardless of what you do, you approach it with excitement and energy. You never do anything halfway or halfheartedly. For you, life is an adventure.
Character Strength # 4 Love of learning
You love learning new things, whether in a class or on your own. You have always loved school, reading, and museums-anywhere and everywhere there is an opportunity to learn.
Character Strength # 5 Bravery
You are a courageous person who does not shrink from threat, challenge, difficulty, or pain. You speak up for what is right even if there is opposition. You act on your convictions.
So whether the above is true would be interesting (I did a lot of soul searching and honest answering) but is it, in the end, other people's perceptions which can make you who you become.
We will see ;)
Oh and spotify is interesting as music is truly social, the platform makes the business, and they give you something for nothing, add amazing value, then advertise that they will take away the adverts of their partners as long as you pay them. Genius.
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