February 2022

Great business leaders are often described as visionary. But what does that even mean? And how do you develop that capability?

I believe there are three forms of vision that are essential for today’s business leaders:

1. Global Vision: How is the world changing and how will that impact our business?
2. Industry Vision: How is our industry changing and how will that impact our business?
3. Business Vision: What is the future to which we aspire for our business?

All three of these, to some extent, are in constant flux, and yet it is valuable to periodically take the time to document your current beliefs about each. In the article linked here, I examine each of these in turn. I use two real-world examples to demonstrate, one of a startup and the other of a large corporation.

Please click here to read the full article.

Made From Scratch is a feel-good story of a scrappy American upstart winning in a challenging environment. 

The book tells the story of the Texas Roadhouse restaurant business through the eyes of Kent Taylor, the founder and CEO of the successful chain. 

The book’s story begins well before the first Texas Roadhouse was even envisioned, capturing the lessons Taylor learned to be prepared for his entrepreneurial journey. The story then moves into true startup mode, with many experiments and lessons learned, burning through cash raised from family, friends, and angels. Finally in 1998, the business model was proven, institutional investors provided $5 million, and the company was ready to scale. Between the end of 1997 and the company’s initial public offering (IPO) in 2003, the company grew from 25 restaurants to 183, and kept on growing. 

Throughout the book, Taylor, in his own inimitable style, shares wild tales of quick decisions (good and bad), lessons learned, and a culture created that provided consistency, pride, and loyalty even as the company expanded around the world. That pride and loyalty would prove essential in the final chapter, when Taylor tells how the restaurant chain navigated the COVID-19-driven challenges of 2020. As he put it “we kept the lights on, America fed, and our Roadies employed,” no small feat!

Read this book if:

• You want to better understand the restaurant industry.
• You want to hear how one company built a powerful brand and culture
• You like to learn lessons from other companies as they overcome challenges of many forms

Don’t read this book if you’re looking for simple lessons tied up in pretty bows, or structured frameworks to make your own job easy. Those you’ll find in the “fast food” or “ready to microwave” equivalent books, not Made From Scratch.

Click here to read the full review of the book.

The Public Relations Handbook, edited by Robert L. Dilenschneider, teaches everything you need to know about public relations (PR) in the digital, post-pandemic world. Nineteen different contributors provide seventeen chapters. The first five chapters outline basic concepts applicable across the field. The next six chapters cover six specific sub-disciplines (government relations, investor relations, media relations, social media, internal communications, and crisis communications). The final six chapters deal with the unique requirements of PR in different settings (private families, higher education, China, Japan, Canada, and Europe).

The Public Relations Handbook is not for everyone. It is exactly what its name implies. This is a handbook for those involved in PR, especially at large companies. It could be used as the text for a college course on public relations since it provides a solid introduction to every facet of the profession. It also could be a very helpful guide for executives working closely with their PR teams, and I could see value in the communications department giving it as a gift to anyone newly identified as a spokesperson for their company to help them understand the nuances of communicating with different audiences. 

However, I imagine it is most valuable residing on the shelf of PR practitioners. When you’ve spent the past few years focused on media relations and your boss asks you to help with investor relations, you can turn to that chapter in the handbook and remind yourself of the basics. When your company is expanding into Japan, the corresponding chapter in the handbook can inform you of the unique needs for PR in that country.

Click here to read the full review.

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve introduced the topic of an entrepreneur’s transition from founder to CEO. I identified eight sub-roles that a leader must master as their startup begins to rapidly scale, but before jumping into each of those roles, I thought it would be helpful to give an example. The story of Joseph in the Bible gives us an example of a gifted young man who developed a capability, and when he gained significant backing, needed to significantly scale that capability rapidly. What can we learn from his story that is applicable to entrepreneurs today?

Joseph isn’t specifically identified as a businessman, but we do see him establishing a means by which he could serve others, conducting transactions that created value for those he served and financial gain from his work. Joseph scaled his scope from serving the limited needs of a few prisoners, to providing for an entire nation. He scaled his horizon from focusing on the day-to-day, to planning out the next 14 years. He built processes around long-term planting, harvesting, and distribution cycles. And he scaled the organization to be a nationwide hierarchy of workers gathering and then distributing food.

Click here to read the full article.

As a startup founder making the transition to CEO of a scaling enterprise you will focus on expanding your skills and learning new tools to master your expanded responsibilities. As you do, it is critical that you do so with an understanding that the scale of your activities is also changing.

Four of the most important dimensions in which your leadership must scale are:

• Scope
• Horizon
• Cycle
• Staff

Click here to read the full article.

Entrepreneurship guru Steve Blank defined a startup as “a temporary organization designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model.” He defined an enterprise as “a permanent organization designed to execute a repeatable and scalable business model.” Many of us have been blessed to live, at different times, in each of those worlds, and yet the transition from one to the other can be hard.

One of the most common times people come to me for help is when they sense that they are in the midst of that transition. In short, their primary job title is changing from “founder” to “CEO”. The signals that indicate this change is happening can vary, but using Blank’s definitions, it’s when the company believes that they’ve found a business model that they can scale and they are ready to invest in scaling it. 

Managing this transition can be hard, but it definitely needs to be thoughtful. Being CEO requires different skills, uses different tools, and has different measures of success than those for being a founder. If you’re going through that transition, today I’m starting a series of articles that I hope will help you be intentional about thinking differently, learning new skills, and applying new tools to drive the success of your business. 

Click here to read the full article.