Dr. Earl R. Smith II
Managing Partner, The Federal Circle
DrSmith@Dr-Smith.com
Dr-Smith.com
It’s seldom the dog that you love that bites you
it’s almost always the one you can barely tolerate.
Many companies fail for reasons that have little to do with their core product or service. It is often the afterthoughts or ‘under-thoughts’ that cause failure when success has been looming on the horizon.
Companies with cutting-edge technologies are regularly beaten by those with more conventional ones – organizations with first rate value propositions find themselves losing to others which do not meet their high standards. The world can seem patently unfair – until you look at the competition – and the competition with the competition – differently.
Evolutionary Ideas
Early in my career as a recidivist entrepreneur I learned, sometimes by the hardest methods, that the business of business is different from the business of the business. You may want to go back and re-read that sentence a couple of times and sort it out before going any further but I will try, in what follows, to show you clearly what I mean.
When a company first comes into existence it is most likely that the entire senior team is composed of individuals who are minor variations on a common pattern. (Age, education, experience, ethnicity, interests, etc) They are comfortable with each other and that goes a long way towards developing the spirit of intense camaraderie that is necessary for any initial success. Each team member may assume (or be assigned) a unique role within the team and company but it is their underlying common characteristics that dominate and define the initial corporate culture .
In the early years a company grows by turning the connections of senior team members, often most notably the CEO’s, into an initial client base. Sometimes this may be possible because some of the senior team have recently left a company which subsequently becomes a client. At other times potential clients may have been supportive of the team’s intentions to launch the company. But, however it occurs, companies which survive the initial stages of growth do so because they have generated, and then cultivated, an initial client base which helps them turn a burn rate into a run rate.
During this stage, corporate functions are serviced either by founders (making it up as they go along) or by narrowly experienced personnel in the business disciplines. So the HR function is managed by a good recruiter and the financial system is handled by a controller. Some of these functions may be outsourced either partially or completely during the early years. The business of business takes a back seat to the business of the business.
The Dogs You Don’t Like
As a company grows in size and complexity the requirements in these ‘business of business’ areas become more critical to its success. Mistakes or errors have more serious implications. The journey from burn rate to run rate – from draining away financial resources to significant levels of net income – is a difficult one for most companies but, once achieved, many companies find themselves in completely uncharted territory and suffering from extreme vertigo. However this transition is managed, a company enters into uncharted waters when it moves into the black.
Companies that manage this transition effectively enter a new evolutionary phase. The transition is non-linear – change is quantum. Some of the characteristics of a start-up are left behind. For instance, they cease being ‘science projects’ and begin the serious journey towards becoming a fully functioning company. They enter onto a path that, with skill, dedication, persistence, wisdom and more than a fair share of luck, may lead their ‘science projects’ towards corporate maturity.
In these early months and years management can mostly provide for the needs of the growing company by sticking close to the ‘dog they love’. By this I mean that, if the company is involved in a particular technology or service, close connection with that technology or service permeates the corporate culture and defines the experience of team members – a gathering of similars. But success and growth brings its own set of issues.
At some point the company’s needs for further growth exceeds the senior management team’s ability to generate new clients and expand the business base. Around this time other – management – issues such as an increasing need for appropriately qualified people to service client’s needs and a rising appetite for financial resources begins to push the management team’s attention towards those ‘dogs that they can barely tolerate’.
Evolutionary Pressures
It is at this critical juncture that two fundamental rules of evolution come into play. The first is ‘evolution or extinction’. Organisms – including companies and CEOs – have to continue evolving as the requirements of the environment they find themselves in change. Without appropriate evolutionary responses to these changes, increasing irrelevance then disappearance defines the future. The second rule is ‘your excess will limit the impact of your excellences’. Aversions have a tendency to produce such excesses. Ignoring a need assiduously, for instance, is such an excess. Aversions lead to conflicts – among the senior team and between the team and the evolving needs of the company. It is these conflicts – completely tangential to either the growth of the company or its evolving needs – more often than inadequacies in the value proposition – that bring down companies.
During this time of transition the culture of the company, along with the core skill sets that have made up the senior management team, begins to undergo a substantial distortion – as an attempt to meet the new needs comes into conflict with the limitations imposed by the ‘old order’. Seen one way, this distortion is actually a movement towards generally accepted business practices and requires recognition that the business of business is becoming more nearly as important as the business of the business. Seen another way it is a threat to ‘traditions’ within the emerging company. CEOs and the senior team will either participate in or oppose these pressures. Their decisions, as much as the competition, will determine the company’s future.
Natural Selection – Surviving the Barrier
Evolutionary pressures tend to, over time, weed out weak and inappropriate behaviors in favor of the strong and relevant. The awful physics of the process can often seem inhuman and arbitrary. But arguments over its humanity or arbitrary nature are red-herrings. Where survival is the imperative, evolutionary accommodation is the only effective response.
So, what does survival mean in this situation? It means appropriate responses to the pressures for growth. It also means that there are real penalties incurred for inappropriate responses to those pressures. Let me provide an example of the later in order to bracket the term ‘appropriate’. Faced with this challenge, many CEOs embark on an ‘educational journey’ to become more sophisticated in one or more functional business areas. Two of the most common are finance and marketing. They seek to become better at these disciplines than the people they have hired. While laudable, this is essentially a reaction to an aversion – a distancing from the ‘dogs they can barely tolerate’ – a distraction from the fundamental challenge that they, as CEOs, face. The company’s needs are changing as it grows. The CEO and senior team need to evolve in order to meet those changing needs – and change can be a difficult proposition even without the pressures of building a company.
Surviving the journey through the barrier has more to do with the maturing of individual senior team members than with the accumulation of additional specific skills sets. Becoming ‘appropriate’ as a leader of a growing company begins with matching that maturation process with that of the company. As adolescents do not tend to do well in adult environments, immaturity in a CEO will, more effectively than almost any other trait, limit the future of the company.
For a CEO, the challenge of evolving along with a growing company can be a daunting one. But, as uncomfortable as that journey might be, the alternative – holding back the company until it finally expires from exhaustion and frustrated aspirations – should motivate any CEO to ‘take the bull by the horns’ and prevail over their own limitations.
Dr Smith’s latest book – Amazing Pace: Turbo-charged Business Development describes how advisory boards can help companies grow rapidly. He can be reached at DrSmith@Dr-Smith.info.
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Related Articles:
- Finding Meaning Without Manufacturing Meaning
- Making the Possible Probable
- Thoughts on Excuses
- Assumption is the Mother of All … – Lessons for Young Wannabees
- Good Reasons Not To – Lessons for Young Wannabees
- Change Aversion – Coming to Terms
© Dr. Earl R. Smith II
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One Response to “Crossing the Boundary – Surviving the Experience”
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11 Responses to “Crossing the Boundary – Surviving the Experience”
1. Charles Bram Says:
December 12th, 2007 at 1:26 pm e
Chief,
I was interested in reading this article because I am building a new organization again. I’ve built and helped to build a lawn care and landscaping company, outsourced data processing centers for state governments, a state and local government IT strategic consulting division, a real estate investment company focused on rehabing and selling property and most recently a team of real estate agents. As the leader of this evolution, it is my role to step back from managing all of our client work to building an infrastructure and providing coaching, mentoring, accountability and training to our new agents.
With the above in mind, I had hoped you would spend more time expressing your thoughts on the idea of the CEO attempting to learn marketing, etc. better than the folks who retain responsibility for those roles and what you feel he should actually be doing.
In my experience, trouble really begins for an organization when it’s leader whether he be CEO or just a division VP or even a senior manager/program manager attempts to lead a team that has grown too large for his personal capabilities related to those found in books like “How to Win Friends and Influence People” AND the business product of the organization he leads is a bit outside his direct skillset. In the IT consulting world I would see it quite often. Someone that was really good at sales would suddenly get an opportunity to open a new consulting practice within a larger organization. This worked well for him when the organization was small. The sales guy understands people well enough to land work. And he understands people enough to get an initial team of consultants going on a project with specific skillsets. And on the whole, consultants are perceived to be able to operate on their own without much oversight from management. Well things would really start to break down as soon as the sales guy deemed practice lead had a few teams out there consulting. Suddenly there are too many balls in the air of odd shapes, weights and sizes. And since he was never a juggler to begin with (he mearly knew how to sell juggler supplies), managing this set of disparate teams of individuals becomes a process of putting out fire after fire with the teams AND most unfortunately with the clients. Where the sales guy’s lack of experience and skillset really hurts is with the clients.
Conversely the practice leads that well understand the subject matter such as setting up a string of data processing centers, are better able to bring on the best people to fill needed roles and there are less fires to constantly fight.
To me these things are easier when building an organization within an organization because costs and ownership aren’t much of an issue when putting together the best team.
However what should a smaller organization do when it has grown beyond the size of the initial team and yet still isn’t profitable enough to pay the “going rate” for true talent nor is there enough of an ownership pie to just hand out equity to make up for a much smaller salary? And how do you get talent to sign non-competes when they know you are small and they are likely to want to move to a new company doing something similar in the next few years?
If you have the time, it would be great to read your expanded thoughts.
Thanks,
Charles Bram
http://www.BramRealty.com
2. Claes Cimini Says:
December 12th, 2007 at 6:12 pm e
Dear Dr. Earl R. Smith
Everybody tends to agree on the fact that group dynamics are complicated. How can you get a team work consistently toward common goals with common sets of values and principles? Even harder : is there a way for a team to reach a certain level of “collective intelligence”?
Achieving this goal is necessary to make an organisation a healthy player in the long run in the context of today tough business world.
Here are the first questions that come on my mind when attempting to assess the “collective intelligence” of a group:
– how efficient is the communication among members?
– how does the group react and self-reorganize when the environment (management staff, client requirements, several new members) suddenly changes?
– how proactively does it think and act?
– how well it is learning based on experience?
These questions are voluntarely open. I personally try to wonder on a regular basis what the next important axis is that should be worked on in my team. And then, how? What is the next step?
At this point, I usually get plenty of extremely worthy ideas from books, articles and blogs, that need to be sorted out, and adapted to the specific case of my team.
Take the first question for instance : the communication within the team could be highly improved by sharing and understanding each other mental models; a first concrete action could be to brainstrom on what can be done there, and then for example schedule a 2-hour session after lunch where each member tell others about his own background, stregnths, weakness and motivations. This is a very good start to build a strong team spirit, I can attest! But the fact is that this is only a single action in the right direction, and all its benefits should ideally be reinvested in another action, in order not to be forgotten.
It is now common sense that a fundamental role of every leader in a knowledge organisation lies in making his team value greater than the sum of its individual parts.
However, it is not so common to understand that each indivdual member takes an active part in the game, by generating a continous flow of positive or negative impacts in daily activities.
The more I am thinking about it, the more I am convinced that a software team is worth to be considered as an intelligent living organism, whose purpose is to transform a business need in a solution.
Its arms are :
– raw technical abilities (languages, products, design principles)
– capacity for innovation
– daily organisation
– collective intelligence (above)
I would suggest the reading of the excellent Kaizen article, and change every words “personal” to “collective”. To paraphrase the article, “Kaizen” is a japanese management strategy, that we could translate to “continuous slow improvement”. I am confident that works for mastering personal life ; what not transposing it to human groups?
Indeed, the work to improvement is so huge and endless, that the only way teams can efficiently handle it is by collectively working one tactic of improvement at a time, make it an habit, before moving to the next tactic.
Don’t you think a team owns more accurate information than external managers for taking responsability about their inner organisation? This does not mean that managers are not useful anymore, nor does it mean that a team should not have leaders; it means that any team should be aware that it has most of the keys at hand for getting to the next stage in the path of improvement.
I am convinced that the only secure way to fully realize a team potential is by working on one single small objective at a time, every week.
My Best Regards
Claes Cimini
CIMINC Corporations
3. Alicia Says:
December 12th, 2007 at 8:21 pm e
Well, if you don’t know where you are going, anyplace is fine.
I liked the explanation by Jeff Timmons on his Timmons model, where there are three circles related in na inverted triangle: “market” on one side, “resources” on the other side, and “people” on the bottom supporting both circles.
The role of the CEO (and of the board by extension) is to keep a balance on the circles, and the trick is to think about the EVOLUTION of the business.
We can support the evolution of our team members by giving them tools: training, consulting support, mentoring to reach the next level needed. and we can support the evolution of the business by bringing in people on a consulting basis if we do not have the resources to pay full market rates. We can also invite them to participate in the gains via equity.
The key issue is to find people who want to grow and support their growth. I think we spend far too much on what we are good at and too little in what we are passionate about. that transition has been fantastic when I’ve lead people into new challenges. If a person does not want to grow, I prefer not to work with that person. If it is a matter of training, knowledge, and experience, we can deal with that.
CEOs also need to plan, create a contingency plan and know when to cut losses short. As I work mostly with innovation, we do accept that failure is possible. knowing when to cut losses short and focusing on the learning curve is critical. I’ve learned more from my mistakes than my successes. When we lose, we don’t lose the lesson. When we win, we win double.
all the best,
Alicia Castillo
4. drsmith Says:
December 12th, 2007 at 8:46 pm e
Dr. Smith,
I found the article to be a nice, to the point and easy read, with poignant comments and points for both the small businessman and the larger company executive. Being a lifelong entrepreneur but only recently a business owner, I can most certainly relate to the different “dogs” one must deal with. While I am fascinated by the fine tuned well oiled nature of the moving parts of businesses, I can’t say that I like petting the dog they call “finance” or even the ones they call “sales”. I know where my passions lay and when it comes to the ‘other dogs’ I am much more likely to be a C- or D+ student.
In reality, I’m a service and relationship guy. I’d give our services away for free if someone else would pay my bills (and buy my kids Christmas gifts)….but the lights don’t stay on if you don’t generate the revenue by making the sale. As a business owner, those are hats one must become accustomed to wearing, even when its not comfortable to wear them.
As you proceed with your comments about how CEO’s expand their skills into other realms to avoid the ‘dogs they hate’, I definitely felt that rang true with my experiences. The unfortunate part is that as companies get larger and more successful, it seems that the ‘dog ‘that many CEOs seem to avoid the most are the ‘dogs’ that keep their company running….their workforce. My experience tells me that once a company gets large enough where the CEO can legitimately distance him or herself from the workforce with the busy executive excuse, he or she will….unless they are truly a leader that believes that the path to results is through the cultivation of a powerful culture, an engaged workforce and personal relationships.
As an entrepreneur and business owner, I think the “moral” is a good one. The lesson that I take away is that you have to know how to intend to grow early on and execute on your plans at various stages in that growth cycle. If you are the innovator and the passion is based upon that, make sure you surround yourself by someone who can provide the services that are needed to keep you in business. Business is a “team sport” that requires the skills and contributions of a great many…even in small organizations.
Thank you for the invitation to review and provide feedback.
-Catal
5. Geoff Quartermaine Bastin Says:
December 13th, 2007 at 2:00 am e
Dear Dr Smith,
You are correct, the business of business rather than the business of the business is critical. I have been through this transition several times. Very, very difficult. We are currently helping the Competitiveness Support Fund (www.competitiveness.org.pk) do this very thing in Pakistan. We have a very academic CEO who established the Fund which has operated as a classic “one man band” as the business grows we have had to become compliant with (amongst other things) USAID standards, requiring recruitment of a full complement of trained HR, IT, logistics, finance persons. Latest recruit has been a COO. Necessarily the CEO will have to adjust to a transition where the management team runs the business of business while he concentrates on vision, direction and external contacts. This change requires a high level of trust by the CEO in new people who may not have his level of understanding in the business of the business (i.e., enabling productivity increases).
So bottom line is I think you have it right.
6. Kasper D. Davidsen Says:
December 13th, 2007 at 5:14 am e
Earl – You’re right!
What I’m thinking is, that the business of business is not only the business at the stages you are referring to – the extreme vertigo.
the business of business is also important, and probably what drives the company to the next level, already from the early days.
And the old company struggling to innovate and reinvent themselves, not to be overtaken, and even the highly succesfull corporation that just keeps going – they are all in the business of business.
So what is the problem really – I think you dexcribe what I will call peters principle – the CEO reaches their incompetence level, and needs to be changed – This will happend in the highly succesful companies, just as in the startups – Because it is ALWAYS business that drives business, not the business of the business!
I totally agree with you!
[Kasper]
7. Pieter Dorsman Says:
December 13th, 2007 at 6:01 am e
Dear Earl,
I believe your observation is pretty accurate when applied to fresh enterprises ‘from scratch’. It is a lot different obviously in new enterprises founded by large, established companies. In those, politics play a huge role right from the start and lots of those new ventures fail simply because the leaders are not entrepreneurs to begin with.
I believe that the task of maturing with the company, or rather change the point of view by changing the position, is truly daunting for the majority of founders. Or even often impossible for them. A good pioneer may know how to survive in the wild, but not be a good farmer. And my observation is that usually the great pioneers can’t be bothered with the much lesser pleasure, to them, of farming.
As you describe it is also my experience that managers in general have a tendency to over-micromanage and try to get hold of control rather than trusting the people they hired for a job. Strangely enough I hear the confirmation of this by the staff: they expect a manager to know what they (the staff) are doing and actually knowing better than they do. Where this is fine in the early days, it becomes more than a nuisance later on in the development of an enterprise. A lot of founders see the enterprise as a baby, and as soon as the baby needs to go to school, they have a hard time letting go. So instead of watching the baby, they start watching the teacher. They lose focus.
It is the same with uncontrollable growth. Growth is actually never uncontrollable, but apparently since someone shouted that a business must grow or it will die, everyone is walking in that direction. If your next level of maturity actually cuts your revenue-per-head in half, you are doing something wrong. But there is an incredibly low number of people who dare to count in or even know the principle of revenue-per-head.
Back to the basic principle, adaptation would be the answer, but like the Buddhist “do not judge” rule, it is extremely hard to do this. A farmer did not become a farmer because he really loves to go out into the jungle cutting down trees and creating a field. As pioneers love to build new things, once it is built, the focus weakens. They either move on or become sort of lazy.
Rather than expecting them to adapt, which most of them in my humble opinion are unable to do, it would be more successful if they would relinquish a decent amount of control to a good farmer-consolidator, and move on into new un- or half-charted territory. I believe this is what someone like Branson does… and quite well at that.
8. drsmith Says:
December 13th, 2007 at 10:52 am e
Hello Earl,
You are correct here. When I was the CEO of an international business, I found that I was spending 85% of my time on various forms of administration. Vital to keep the company both going and growing. Learned this early in life.
That is why the business survived a severe downturn in the marketplace as a result of the Reagan Recession in the early 80s. This was a hard experience, but well worth the lessons learned for the future.
All the best, Marshall
9. Allen Crawford Says:
December 13th, 2007 at 11:39 am e
I have worked for a few small companies and currently work for a maturing small company.
One of the small companies I worked for grew at an compound annual growth rate of 150% per year (more than doubling in size each year). It eventually sold for 10x the current stock price. Why was this company so successful? It had everything to do with the CEO.
When I started with the company, we were only 100 employees in size. Not one person was allowed to have a job title appear on their business cards because the CEO believed that everyone was responsible for the success of the company and therefore should be ready to assist in anything which was top priority but didn’t have sufficient resources. In practice, that never meant that it actually happened that anyone did something they weren’t hired to do. What it meant was, we each were responsible for the growth of the company, responsible to always be focussed on what was most important to the company, and responsible to take action.
He also strongly believed that inaction was a greater “sin” than doing something but making a mistake in what you did. Every employee was hired to take action. We each were recognized as being human. Humans do make mistakes.
Which leads to a third value he believed and practiced. Being human means we sometimes make mistakes. It was extremely important how we handled those mistakes. The CEO expected each and every employee to take ownership of a mistake so that you can mitigate the damages and also learn from it. So what would happen, someone would say, “I messed up”. Then a true team of people would pitch in, fix the problem, set things right, and then move on. NEVER was there ever a focus on “blame”. Why? Because everyone knew this was unproductive.
Finally, the last value which lead to the great success of the company was that the CEO use to say, “I hire adults. If you want to behave as a child, find another company to work for.” What he meant by this was that he never expected people to ask for permission to make decisions. He never expected people to seek approval to take action. What he did expect was that we would recognize our shortcomings and seek support when needed, and act independently when we had the skills, knowledge, information, and ability to take action.
What has stood in the way of the other small companies from growing is very much due to the opposite position on one or more of the above principles not being followed. It seems the most difficult thing for a founder to do is to give up control. It is very much like parenting a child. As the child grows, the parents must give more and more independence to their offspring. As a company grows, the founder(s) must recognize that they have hired people who are more competent than them in one or more professional disciplines and therefore, must provide an environment which permits these people to exercise their talents and to grow.
A company can be only as good as their staff is allowed to be.
10. Caryl Says:
December 13th, 2007 at 11:27 pm e
Great article and insight.
Passion and drive of the primary entreprenuer are the fundamentals for most start-up companies. For R&D technical types, they love tinkering with the technology–they will pay attention to the business operations–but this is not what consumes their interest. Hence, as you pointed out they must surround themselves with savvy buisness types who can run their operations successfully. It is all about trust. As CEO, why expend the energy trying to shore up a weakness when you should concentrate on your strengths–especially if it is for your core product?
As your company grows, it may be about ego also, when does one come to the realization they should not be the CEO but maybe the head of R&D? Team work and the human interaction may have fostered creativity initially–but it can have a dampening effect as the company grows and a CEO becomes more insulated or distanced from knowing his staff in a personal way. There is a spectrum from the boutique companies with the family feel to the global corporations run by numbers. They both can be very successful–but they require different attitudes and approaches by the CEO and their staffs.
11. Zen Benefiel Says:
December 14th, 2007 at 11:36 am e
Hey Chief,
Great responses and thank you for asking for mine. In most cases I find the simplest of details often get missed. A good leader or leadership team can take a company to new heights by hiring the right people with expertise and giving them the tools to do their job well. A stellar leader takes it one step further and includes some very common sense type components. I say common sense because of the paradox often experienced: the rareness of it.
CEOs rarely look for holes, let alone are prepared to plug them at a moment’s notice. Crisis management rules small to large enterprises in nearly every case as the bucket develops leaks. Proactive involvement (checking the road ahead for potholes, sharp turns or even washouts) means that the ‘team’ is gathered on a regular basis to poke holes in the fabric of the business where it is most vulnerable and even where it is not. Contingency plans are often afterthoughts in the development process.
New millennium management is bringing back the age-old common sense approach of honesty, openness and trust in your organization as well as your leadership abilitiies. As an eduholic who enjoys exploring human dynamics there are some simple salient points to growing and sustaining the business of business. First, communication of the mission and vision includes the buy-in discussion, goal setting and action plans of the leadership. Second, the working relationships on the ocean of emotion are encouraged and empowered to lead, to think for themselves and share ideas even when they may not be popular. Third, the establishment of regular team meetings where change management is discussed and implemented so as to not only prepare for the potholes; to be prepared to remove sections of the road if necessary.
The nature of human beings is to avoid conflict at all costs, let alone become vulnerable to weaknesses. We’re timid in the face of fear or fire. Conversely, the most important aspect of growing a company is in its communication plan on both personal and professional levels. As Cleas mentions, the collective intelligence needs to be able to fire synapses in any direction based on the needs of the moment. How can you build a strong team without knowing all its components and skill sets?
The business of the business is fairly well understood and incorporated into the corporate culture as a business grows. The dynamics of the challenge to change, whether it be to anticipate and prepare for market shifts, meet changing client needs or increase interdepartmental collaboration fluctuate as vascilations occur. People are not numbers, yet it takes numbers of them to grow a business. The new millennium management mindset even empowers the widget makers to think about process and/or product improvement and communicate their discoveries.
The truly evolutionary business models include anthropic (life friendly) components that address the growing need for environmental and social responsibility. Like old dogs, though, it is really tough to change the dollar-driven decisions that have infected our consciousness with poor fiscal and resource management. My adoptive father once gave me some advice that I have found priceless, even though I haven’t always followed it: ‘Tackle the toughest problem first and the rest becomes easy.’
The business of business leadership needs role models that appear fearless in the face of change, who know how to seek advice from those wiser and embrace change through education and empowering their organization to do so. Senge’s ‘Learning Organization’ and DeBono’s ‘Six Hats’ method are key elements for dealing with the business of business. A good practice is hiring a coach/consultant who knows the right questions to ask to expose the next-level questions that keep the business of the business in the growth curve. The outside the box view provides a fresh look without bias or constraints.
Even with stellar leadership challenges arise that engage the discipline and dynamics of human behavior; the ability to act in integrity with some kind of moral and ethical code that builds respect and trust within the organization and in the marketplace. I sense a shift in consumerism that will precipitate the launching of new business as well as the demise of others that are not prepared to meet the challenges or simply have products/services that are less mature. I have my concerns, especially when our country’s leadership can’t demand any more than a 35 mpg fleet average in the next 13 years. Mac Anderson’s new book, ‘You can’t send a duck to eagle’s school’ seems to fit here.
Lead with passion and vision,
Zen