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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Fachliteratur
- Sprache: Englisch
How to tap the real source of entrepreneurial power in you and in your organization The UnStoppables is based on foreword author Graham Weston's experience growing Rackspace, as well as fascinating case studies from such organizations as the Navy SEALs and Israeli Special Forces. In The UnStoppables Bill Schley, co-founder of the branding firm Brand Team Six shows how the best practitioners think continuously about two things: The Big Picture and the Little Picture--essence and essentials. The essentials are the business and financial mechanics required of any working enterprise. But the essence is the emotional mechanics to deal with obstacles, risk, fear and failure. Mastering the emotional mechanics is how entrepreneurs succeed and winners win. This is how you capture the unlimited power of entrepreneurship to spark a successful start-up or revitalize a mature organization. * Explains why what's stopping you is more important than what's starting you, how to tap the essence of entrepreneurial power in you and in your organization, and how motion generates vision * Bill Schley is an award winning author and established expert on branding and marketing communications, as well as the co-founder and creative director of the branding firm Brand Team Six * Graham Weston is the internationally renowned co-founder and chairman of Rackspace, the world's #1 cloud computing and managed hosting company Locally, this book teaches you how to become an entrepreneur or to inspire an entrepreneurial mindset to boost any stage business. Globally, this book is about how this nation can launch thousands more entrepreneurs for the future.
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Seitenzahl: 351
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013
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CONTENTS
Foreword
The UnStoppables in Seven Sentences
Introduction
Part I: Big Ideas About You
Chapter 1: Who Is an Entrepreneur and What Do They Do, Really?
Opinions: Everybody’s Got One . . .
Who’s Going to Make It through Hell Week?
Here’s What We Do Know
. . . And So Do Most Five-Year-Olds
The Entrepreneur’s Real Difference
What Do They Dream About?
From Entrepreneurial to Entrepreneur
Big Wide Tent
Not Just for Start-Ups
Not Just for CEOs
What It Adds Up to
Chapter 2: Accelerated Proficiency
Wax On, Wax Off
The Krav Maga Kids
Accelerated Proficiency 101
The Four Steps for Accelerated Proficiency
The Law of Motion
The Rule of Three or Four
Think on Your Feet
Simple Beats Complicated
Define the Center—and Go All in
Chapter 3: Emotional Mechanics
What is Emotional Mechanics?
Examples All around Us
Understanding Fear
Fear and the Brain
Fear’s Achilles’ Heel
The Power of Risk
The Power of Failure
The Power of Obstacles
The Love Advantage
The Unsurpassed Power of Belief
Chapter 4: How to Master Emotional Mechanics Like the Experts
True Team: The Number One Fear Tamer
The Mental Magic of Reframing
The Secret of Self-Talk
Micro-Scripts are the Self-Talk Secret
The Simple Power of “Knowing What to Do”
Procedures and Automatics
Extinguishing
Fear Training
Fear Energy Turned Around
Goodness
Part II: Getting Down to Business
Chapter 5: School of Everything You Need to Know (in an Hour)
Orientation
The Optimizers versus the Entrepreneurs
The Challenge for Any Company
Our Mission at Accelerated Proficiency U.
Chapter 6: The Big Picture in an Hour
Everything You Need to Know about Ideas
What All Business Ideas Must Do
Chapter 7: The Big Picture (Continued)
People
Founding Teams Always Have an Edge
People and Culture, Day One
Give before You Get
What Employees Want
What Customers Want
What Everyone Else Wants
Execution
The Law of the Laser
Data Makes You Dumber
Practice with Live Rounds
Ask, Ask, Ask is How You Receive
Chapter 8: The UnStoppable Six
The Piper Cub Principle
The UnStoppable Six
The Strategic Three
The Tactical Three
Business Planning: Make the UnStoppable Six Your Template
Chapter 9: Everything You Need to Know about Your Unique Difference (in about an Hour)
“Where is the Center?”
Specific is Terrific
No Difference? Then You’re a Commodity
There’s Always a Difference—If You Know Where to Look
Anatomy of a Selling Difference
The One Item of Carry-on Rule
Your Dominant Selling Idea
How Rackspace Discovered Its Difference
The Universal Paradox
Other People’s Heads are All That Counts
Chapter 10: Everything You Need to Know about True Teams (in about an Hour)
The Roots of Small, Super-Powered Teams
True Teams
How an UnStoppable Culture Nurtures Teams
Fish Camp
Big, Simple Cultural Symbols
True Teams at Rackspace: The Untold Story
Chapter 11: Everything You Need to Know about Succeeding with Customers (in about an Hour)
Today the Saying Needs a Tweak
What’s a Customer?
Succeeding with Customers
Customer Psychology
The Most Important Principle of All: Wear Your Values on Your Sleeve
Chapter 12: Everything You Need to Know about Making Yourself Famous (in about an Hour)
Caution: Famous Works Both Ways
Branding 101
The Four-Line Elevator Pitch
How Name, Frame, and Claim Made Rackspace a Multibillion-Dollar Company
Chapter 13: Everything You Need to Know about Creating Revenue, a.k.a. Selling (in about an Hour)
Marketing without Sales is Like Motherhood without Sex
The “Selling is Evil” Myth
The Five Universal Steps to Selling
The X Factor in Selling
Teach Yourself to Sell the Accelerated Proficiency Way
How Much Revenue? Just Break Even
Chapter 14: Everything You Need to Know about Perfecting Your First Product (in about an Hour)
Professionals Make It Real, Not Ideal
Remember, Nobody Wants 57 Features; They Want 1 Done Best
Which Data to Listen to, Which to Throw Away?
UnStoppable Themes
Part III: Conclusion
Chapter 15: Entrepreneur Country and the E-Companies
The Stakes are the Same
How We Can Do It
The Entrepreneurial Groundswell is Happening
Teaching to the Essence
The E-Companies
Fear Cultures
Belief Cultures: How They Happen
Managing to Strengths
New Entrepreneurs and Enterprises Spawned
Welcome to the Arena
Acknowledgments
Index
Cover design: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Copyright © 2013 by Bill Schley. All rights reserved.
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.
Published simultaneously in Canada.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Schley, Bill, 1952-
The unstoppables : tapping your entrepreneurial power / Bill Schley.
pages cm
Includes index.
ISBN 978-1-118-45949-2 (cloth); ISBN 978-1-118-52627-9 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-52621-7 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-52619-4 (ebk)
1. Entrepreneurship. 2. Creative ability. I. Title.
HB615.W474 2013
658.4′21—dc23
2013000460
TO RACKERS EVERYWHERE
FOREWORD
A Quest for the Essence of Entrepreneurship
THE UNSTOPPABLESISN’T JUST A BOOK. It’s the product of a quest—a shared quest by author Bill Schley and me to discover the keys to entrepreneurship and to share them with people all over America. Our goal is to double the number of entrepreneurs in our country—starting with you, our readers. And if you choose the entrepreneurial path, we want to double your chances of success. Those are the goals behind every chapter and every page of Bill’s book.
To understand this objective and why we’re so passionate about it, you need to know a little bit about us.
The company I helped found, Rackspace, was launched by three former college buddies from Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, in 1998. We now employ more than 5,000 Rackers in locations from Texas to London to Hong Kong. Our mission: To provide hosting and cloud computing backed by “Fanatical Support” to more than 200,000 customers worldwide, including most of the Fortune 100.
Our world headquarters is located in a building we call the Castle—a once-abandoned mall in a forgotten neighborhood in San Antonio. My desk sits beside the space once occupied by Gingiss Formal Wear, where I rented my first baby-blue ruffled tuxedo for the high school prom. All the experts said we were crazy when we moved here, but I guess that’s how we do things at Rackspace: we listen to our Rackers and to our customers first. Only later do we check with the experts.
Today, customers come from all over the world to visit us in this 1.2-million-square-foot space that no one else wanted. They sense the energy of the place, they see the excitement and enthusiasm on every Racker’s face, and they tell us that it still feels like a startup—a vibrant enterprise driven by hungry entrepreneurs. Rackspace has evolved into a big, well-managed company that’s traded on the New York Stock Exchange, grew by more than 25 percent in 2012 to $1.3 billion in annual revenue, and is earning accolades worldwide—but we’ve never lost our entrepreneurial zeal.
Maybe that’s why Fortune magazine just named us one of the Best Companies to Work For in America for the fifth time in six years. People love working here, and we love them back. And in turn we all love our customers. Call another company and you’ll probably listen to a recording, start pressing buttons, and listen to more recordings. Call Rackspace and you’ll speak with a Racker, trained and empowered to solve our customers’ problems. We’re famous for our combination of innovative technology and passionate Rackers, which enables us to deliver the Fanatical Support for which we’ve become known throughout our industry.
You may be starting to get a feeling for why I’m such a believer in the power of entrepreneurship. I’ve seen it work its creative magic here at Rackspace. I’ve seen the value it’s created for every Racker, for our far-flung customers, and for communities like the one in which our headquarters is located in San Antonio, where our arrival helped reverse 20 years of decline. I know that this same power is what communities all over America need to thrive in the twenty-first century—and I also know, sadly, that it’s what far too many are lacking.
That’s the source of the obsession that underlies The UnStoppables.
My obsession with uncovering insights into entrepreneurship was spurred by the Great Recession of 2008–2009 and the period of sluggish growth that followed. The U.S. job creation engine is broken. How can we fix it? The key is entrepreneurship.
No one works harder to understand entrepreneurship than the Kansas City, Missouri–based Kauffman Foundation, which bears the name of a great twentieth-century entrepreneur, Ewing Marion Kauffman, a former salesman who went on to found a great pharmaceutical company. I encourage readers of Bill’s book to visit the Kauffman Foundation website and dig into its impressive archive of original research, particularly the 2009 report, The Anatomy of an Entrepreneur. Recent research by the foundation has shown that the vast majority of new jobs in this country are created by young organizations, those that are less than five years old. Politicians, reporters, and many average citizens tend to assume that job creation is the province of giant corporations—the Fords, GEs, and Walmarts of the world. They do play their part. But the real source of most well-paid, emotionally rewarding jobs is young businesses—and that means entrepreneurship.
So where will the great entrepreneurs of tomorrow come from?
In search of an answer, I visited my alma mater, Texas A&M, where I was invited to speak to their MBA students. They were a bright, idealistic, and engaged bunch. After offering a few remarks, I asked the students, “How many of you would like to start your own businesses one day, or work for a young business?” Practically every hand shot up.
Then I asked, “And how many of you will be doing that as soon as you graduate from A&M?” There were a few chuckles around the room, and nearly all the hands came down. It seems there was a huge gap between the dream of entrepreneurship and the real-life plans most students had created.
I asked the students to explain the gap, and the answers were revealing. Several students pointed to the huge debt they were carrying after years of expensive undergraduate and graduate-school training. Many would graduate owing $50,000 or more. That burden made them more risk averse than when they began their studies. It discouraged all but the most daring among them from undertaking the personal and financial risk that’s inevitable when launching or joining a young company.
Others pointed out that, armed with an MBA from a respected university, they could probably land a six-figure salary from a prestigious, established company that their parents would be proud to mention to their friends. That path would give them security (or so they thought) and enable them to quickly start paying down their student loans. Launching a start-up or joining a young company would mean they’d face a far greater opportunity cost—another factor discouraging entrepreneurship.
The third factor, I came to learn, was the nature of MBA studies themselves. The business students at our great universities learn many useful skills—accounting, finance, organizational dynamics, human resource management, and much more. They leave school well equipped to help run mature enterprises. But they don’t learn how to assert their will or overcome their fear of failure. And they don’t spend enough time studying the essence of entrepreneurship: getting in motion, building your team, and learning how to succeed with customers.
Combining these factors, it’s no wonder that entrepreneurship is flagging in America, and that our once-powerful job creation engine is stalled. The educational institutions that we rely on are inadvertently stifling the entrepreneurs who might otherwise emerge. They destroy more entrepreneurial spirit than they create.
I decided that I wanted to try to help solve this problem. And that’s where author and branding strategist Bill Schley enters the picture.
I often listen to books on tape while driving to work and back. A few years ago, I happened across Bill Schley’s book, Why Johnny Can’t Brand. The book had made a Top Five Marketing Books of the Year list someone had sent me, and once I heard it, I knew why. It was full of insights that I wanted to put into action.
I reached out to Bill at his offices in Connecticut. A few months later, I welcomed him and his business partner to Rackspace for a tour of our company and some working sessions with our senior leadership team. Bill and I hit it off from the start, and over the ensuing months a business relationship developed into friendship.
Most important, we discovered our mutual passion for entrepreneurship. We were obsessed by the same questions: What lies at the heart of entrepreneurship? Why do some entrepreneurs succeed while others fail? And how can our society double the number of new entrepreneurs we produce?
Bill and I decided to set out on a journey to answer these questions.
Our quest took us well beyond the boundaries of the business world. We journeyed from Texas to New York to the West Coast. From there we traveled to Israel, a tiny nation with an amazing entrepreneurial culture that is well documented in the book Start-up Nation by Dan Senor and Saul Singer. We met a host of amazing business founders there, along with government officials, educators, and experts who helped us understand how Israeli society has been reshaped deliberately to foster the spirit of entrepreneurship—with incredible results.
After we returned from Israel, I had to get back to work at Rackspace, but Bill traveled on to Virginia Beach and San Diego, where he observed and met with members of the U.S. Navy SEALs. In his research, he’d discovered that this most elite force of warriors has a number of crucial characteristics in common with the greatest entrepreneurs, including a willingness to adapt on the fly, dedication to the mission, readiness to tackle (and master) risk, and single-minded devotion to the team. He suspected that if he could learn what propels the SEALs beyond all normal human limits to succeed in some of the world’s most challenging environments, he might unearth secrets that could fuel the work of aspiring entrepreneurs. And that suspicion proved to be absolutely correct—as you’ll learn in the pages of this book.
Finally, our quest brought Bill and me back to where we started—to Rackspace. As I’ve explained, Rackspace is no ordinary company. We’ve kept the entrepreneurial feeling alive even as we’ve gone global. Rackers are as fired up about the mission—to give Fanatical Support to our customers—as we were when we were a start-up.
The question was: How did Rackers accomplish this? Did we really know? If there were definable insights into our success that could help more entrepreneurs succeed as we did, could we codify and explain them? I had to know the answer—in part, for the benefit of our own expanding legions of Rackers. It’s critical for us at Rackspace to keep replicating our own success as we grow. Being able to communicate our approach in clear, simple language would be enormously valuable in helping nurture the Rackspace of the future.
At the same time, I knew that countless other Americans could benefit from a deeper insight into the wellsprings of entrepreneurship.
A few years ago, San Antonio Mayor Julián Castro, one of the most dynamic young political leaders in our country, asked me to help lead SA2020, his long-range strategic initiative for the city. That yearlong experience confirmed my belief that if we are going to change our cities, and thus our country, we can only do it by fostering an entrepreneurial culture. Entrepreneurs create fulfilling jobs, unleash opportunities, take the big risks, build wealth, replace the old with the new, and keep our nation competitive.
This conviction is one reason I recently launched a coworking space for startups called Geekdom in San Antonio. After only a year, it has become one of the country’s fastest-growing shared working environments for young entrepreneurs. Within its first year, it grew to be the largest program of its kind in Texas, with more than 500 members working with mentors and energetically coming together to transform ideas into new apps, products, and services. Soon a spinoff program took Geekdom into local high schools and middle schools. We’re planting the seeds of entrepreneurship early.
Geekdom also became home to TechStars Cloud, part of the Boulder-based nationwide technology accelerator program. The San Antonio program is unique, as it is devoted to cloud-related innovation. Young developers and entrepreneurs from around the world are knocking on the door, asking to come here. Our second TechStars class is just beginning, and I can’t wait to see what emerges from it—perhaps a future Google or Rackspace. So the personal quest that drove Bill Schley and me to travel the world in search of the essence of entrepreneurship has already started to bear some remarkable fruit along the way.
Bill and I didn’t set out to write a book. It was only after we came home from our travels and our many conversations that we realized we had accumulated insights worth sharing. An experienced author, Bill decided to take on the task of writing it down—and that’s how The UnStoppables was born.
This isn’t a book about Rackspace, and it’s certainly not a book about me. The observations are often fascinating, but they’re in Bill’s words, not mine. This book is a manifesto and a guidebook for Americans who want to build something of value and take charge of their own destiny. It’s an invitation to you to overcome your doubts and fears and to dare to follow your dreams.
America is the original start-up nation. And the land of Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Bill Gates, and Steve Jobs is still the world’s premier source of entrepreneurial creativity and zeal. We have everything it takes to lead the world into a new age of entrepreneurship—and there’s never been a better time than now. The Internet provides access to global markets, and the cloud lets you build your business with less capital than ever before. All we need are more people who are ready to get into motion and take advantage of today’s unprecedented possibilities.
America is and must remain the Broadway stage of entrepreneurship—the magnetic hub of creativity and growth that entrepreneurs from India, China, Brazil, and everywhere on earth recognize as the greatest place to seek fame and fortune.
I’ve always believed that the best way to predict the future is to invent it—and the best way to predict your future is to invent it yourself. That’s the wisdom entrepreneurs understand and live by.
Ask yourself: Do you want to watch others create and build the future, or do you want to do it yourself? If the idea of stepping into the arena and joining the action excites you, you’ve come to the right place.
Welcome to The UnStoppables.
—Graham Weston,
Chairman and Cofounder of Rackspace
San Antonio, Texas
THE UNSTOPPABLESIN SEVEN SENTENCES
INTRODUCTION
How the Chairman of Rackspace, Some Navy SEALs, and a Few Israeli Innovators Came Together and Discovered the Heart of Entrepreneurship
IT WAS A WARM OCTOBER DAY in Tel Aviv in 2011. Graham Weston and I were sitting in a coffee shop, being entertained by Yossi Vardi, one of the fathers of the entrepreneurial miracle in this tiny country that likes to call itself “Start-Up Nation.”1 Among dozens of tech companies he has seeded, Vardi may be best known for funding ICQ, as in “I Seek You,” the Internet instant messaging program developed by his son, who hadn’t gone to college, and two others. ICQ had 12 million users by the time AOL bought it in 1998 for $407 million dollars. If you remember, 12 million users was a lot back in 1998.
Graham and I weren’t getting a word in edgewise in the conversation, but we didn’t care—we were listening to a guy who’d done more successful start-ups than most first-world countries, waxing poetic with statements like “Business plans and sausages are alike—only people who don’t know how they are made will eat them.” And “God created the world in six days because he didn’t have a customer base” (a back-handed reference to the barriers to innovation that big companies face). As Vardi expounded on the biggest obstacle to entrepreneurship—a syndrome he dubbed “middle manager disease”—he called on the young man who was mopping the floor by our table to illustrate a couple of points.
“The founders at the top of the company still believe in the mission—it’s their baby. So do the people down on the floor.” (Vardi pointed to the floor mopper.) “They take personal pride in the job and the work they do. By the way, this whole country is on an entrepreneurial mission—even that kid with the mop will be working on one. Watch.”
Yossi called over the 21-year-old floor mopper, then the 22-year-old waitress. He asked them whether, besides this job, they were working with their friends to start a company. Both instantly smiled and nodded—and the floor mopper promptly launched into his investor pitch!
What struck us at that moment was a really simple idea. These kids believed, “My ideas can matter. I can dream and I can dare. It’s possible for me.”
At all levels of society, in schools and even the army, a national culture was teaching them to go ahead and try—and, if they failed, to try again better the next time.
When people feel this way, a kind of switch goes off inside them. They’re suddenly inclined to put themselves into motion, to leave the safety of the comfort zone and go for whatever they want to accomplish in life, especially a goal like entrepreneurship. When you get this kind of belief, it makes you UnStoppable.
How you get it is the central theme of this book. It’s why we begin our story about American entrepreneurship here at this café in the heart of Israel, talking with a guy whose investment strategy is simply to find and bet on inspired people—regardless of what their business plans look like.
But why should we care about entrepreneurship?
The answer is simple: because entrepreneurs will make the jobs, invent the industries, create the new markets, and populate the big new companies that will lead us to victory in the war for the economic future. They always have. And if we remember who and what we are as a nation, they always will.
Because America is the original Start-Up Nation. For more than two centuries, we have been “the place where the future happens first.” Not because America was always first in school subjects like reading, physics, and math, or in metrics like military might. We weren’t. But we were always first and best in the field we invented. Our unique global asset was dreaming + doing. We are the Entrepreneurs.
In fact, entrepreneurship is literally in our DNA. Every settler had to take a risk and a leap of faith just to get here. They were adventurers, strivers, freethinkers, and dreamers who all came imagining a better life. If you wanted a business or a farm, then you had to start one. And when this entrepreneurial hothouse needed a government, we created disruptive, game-changing systems and institutions that have favored entrepreneurship ever since.
In time, entrepreneurial leadership brought us economic, military, and moral leadership. But now we are in danger of losing it, and if we do, the world as we and everyone else knows it will change.
Today, America’s leadership is being disrupted by new competition powered by technology, population, and the universal desire to share the dream America invented. We want the world to enjoy such progress. But to remain leaders, we need to “disrupt back,” to be creative and innovative—entrepreneurial—in how we advance. The status quo won’t get us there.
ENTREPRENEUR PROBLEM, ENTREPRENEUR SOLUTION
When Graham and I launched our search for the secret to creating entrepreneurs, we looked everywhere “inside the box” for the answer. We talked to countless experts, hoping for an “a-ha! moment” of inspiration and recognition—but that moment refused to come.
We found that professors and business experts had done tons of research and written copious amounts on the subject of entrepreneurship. The problem was that nobody agreed on anything. Their claims were cancelling each other out. The other problem was that they were often writing epiphanies that sounded like this:
Entrepreneurship is an approach to management defined as the pursuit of opportunity without regard to resources currently controlled and the motivation to pursue those opportunities to achieve a desired future state.
We didn’t know what a kid with an idea for a new app, or a mom with a mortgage whose job just went to India, was supposed to do with advice like that.
And then there was the problem of scale.
To compete in the next century, we don’t need hundreds or thousands of new entrepreneurs—we need millions. But the current establishment won’t provide them. Our educational system is designed to create great Optimizers—people who are really good at maximizing profits, squeezing out inefficiencies, and building best practices—all important skills. But entrepreneurs specialized in a different set of skills: judging when the rules need to be broken, when to accept risk, and how to keep going in uncharted waters. These are the skills this book will focus on.
Besides that, higher education is getting too exclusive. The best MBA programs cost $100,000 or more and take two years to complete. There are other new programs, like the Silicon Valley–style incubators that offer an amazing, accelerated opportunity to a select number of applicants who are entrepreneurs to start with, drawn from the one or two percent of the population that seem to have the entrepreneurial DNA to begin with. But these programs alone just aren’t enough.
We need to tap into our other 98 percent to boost our front-line entrepreneurial force. We need a national mobilization of people, production, and smart government partnership to promote a broader entrepreneurial culture. We realized that we had to look beyond the status quo to figure out how to make it happen. We’d have to find the a-ha! moment for ourselves.
So we went on a journey—a journey to destinations we never anticipated.
OUR ROAD TRIP
One of our first stops was the nation of Israel. It has barely seven million people—2 percent of the U.S. population—yet it’s second only to America in its number of venture-funded start-ups, more than all of Europe combined, according to Start-up Nation. Twenty years ago, its start-up economy didn’t even exist. What happened? We had to find out.
We also went Silicon Valley, Boulder, Colorado, Boston and New York, and the United Kingdom. We spoke with Harvard professors, business legends, rising stars, venture capital moguls, grandfathers from the Greatest Generation—and we re-rented The Karate Kid. Pursuing our hunch that we might gain fresh insights about overcoming obstacles from people who do it for a living in some of the most dangerous locations on earth, we sought out the world’s most elite warriors, the U.S. Navy SEALs and their counterparts in the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF).
The journey was long, circuitous, and filled with surprises. But we found what we were looking for.
THE BIG A-HA!’S
Most of what we discovered about what makes ordinary people UnStoppable didn’t come from business or academic experts. The best stuff was taught to us personally by members of the SEALs and the Israeli Special Forces. These folks—the toughest and most elite practitioners of risk-management and problem-solving on earth—talk about a key to success that MBA professors don’t teach . . . something even more important than the technical mechanics of their craft. They teach what we call emotional mechanics—the internal capacity to get yourself started, to keep going, to overcome obstacles, and to innovate on the fly. They are the real-world PhDs in the art and science of making ordinary people UnStoppable—and the lessons they teach apply to anyone who seeks success in any field.
We also discovered a system that can speed up the learning curve for entrepreneurs. It’s a set of rules and principles that teaches you how to get into motion, safely and quickly, to accomplish any objective you have. It’s called Accelerated Proficiency, and it’s a system that people have used for centuries to mobilize and train themselves in times of war or crisis. It relies most of all on discovering the essence of whatever challenge you face.
A commander in the IDF explained it like this: “When you are in a tough spot and you have to improvise to save the mission, there is one question you must constantly ask yourself: Where is the center?”
It’s the question that gets you to the heart of the matter. How do we align this? What is the essence of this problem and its solution?
The more you look, the more you see that there is an essence to every important skills-based challenge human beings undertake. The moment we get it, we switch from uncertainty to understanding, from doubt to belief, both mentally and physically.
Take swimming. The best classroom teacher in the world can talk to you endlessly and brilliantly about the theory and concept of swimming. He can spend weeks on the physics of buoyancy, swimming case histories, even take you to the beach to observe it firsthand. You’ll know a lot about swimming.
But you’ll never understand it—what it is to do it—until you jump off the pier and get wet. Even just once. Five minutes of thrashing around, getting water up your nose, feeling the cold, controlling the panic, and keeping your head above water is worth five years in that classroom—because those minutes expose you to the essence. And experiencing the essence gives you the emotional ability to jump in and start swimming on your own.
Learners can become rapidly proficient at astonishing things when they are soaked in the essence from the start, then given a small skills set and rules set that support the essence. When these elements are tied together, the result is Accelerated Proficiency. Those who aren’t exposed to these things, even with years of instruction, may never become proficient at all.
This book is going to show you the essence of entrepreneurship. Then we’ll review the short skills and rules sets that will enable Accelerated Proficiency in any enterprise. Some of the insights we’ll share may come as a shock to you—a paradigm-shifting “a-ha! moment” that may change your life.
When Einstein first proposed his theory of relativity a century ago, he said, in effect: “All the laws of physics are great, except for two things: We’ve got light and gravity wrong.”
Einstein’s pronouncement changed everything, and modern physics was the result.
The institutions teaching entrepreneurship today have got light and gravity wrong. The essence of entrepreneurship is really something quite different from what they believe—and it’s the one thing they don’t teach.
You’ll learn it here. And you may find the impact life-transforming.
PART I: BIG IDEAS ABOUT YOU
Before we take the plunge into the heart of our story, let’s take a moment to outline what you can expect as you read the pages that follow. Part I of this book will:
With Part I in hand, you’ll be ready to go to work.
PART II: YOUR UNSTOPPABLE TOOL KIT
The world’s best practitioners can think on their feet. One of their secrets is that they constantly refer to a small set of master principles—what one SEAL called his mental tool kit.
There are two main things we brought back from our journey to the heart of entrepreneurship. The first is a belief in the essence. The second is a unique tool kit for entrepreneurs based on our experiences, our observations, and the phenomenal success of Rackspace—a set of practical principles that work directly with Accelerated Proficiency and are ready for you to use on day one.
Part II lays out a summary of six master aligning principles—keys to success you can carry with you anywhere—that could only be compiled after our worldwide journey. They’re based on hours of one-on-one discussions, analysis, and brainstorming about how Rackspace has outpaced nearly all of its competitors while remaining entrepreneurial and remarkably happy. They aren’t official Rackspace company positions—they are the author’s summary of what he learned from studying the company and talking endlessly with its remarkable chairman and cofounder.
Maybe six big principles don’t sound like a lot. But the fact is that the best entrepreneurs in the world can tell you everything they know about business in about an hour. The rest is the intuition they can’t articulate—lessons they learned by experiencing successes and failures, things they know without knowing how they know.
You’ll learn these lessons too as soon as you get into motion and start practicing the right principles, just as they did.
PART III: CONCLUSION: US
No one ever succeeds alone. Our nation needs to build a much broader entrepreneurial ecosystem, just as drivers need a highway system, carmakers, and gas stations to run their vehicles.
One key part of the ecosystem involves a new kind of company that will maintain its entrepreneurial energy no matter how big it gets—because it’s built and led by entrepreneurial DNA—and is dead set on staying that way.
These are the E-companies. Today, Rackspace and a few others are prototype E-companies, to the benefit of their engaged employees, enthused customers, and shareholders. America’s companies have the unique opportunity and responsibility to help build the entrepreneurial ecosystem. We’ll examine how and why.
THE POWER THAT’S WAITING
We spent time with special warfare experts in the course of this project so we could apply their emotional wisdom for businesspeople, including ourselves. But at times we wondered whether all the military metaphors would seem irrelevant or even off-putting to a mainstream audience.
Our answer came in a typically cogent response one day from an IDF elite forces commander. He said:
We’re not trying to make them into fighters.
We’re trying to make them into believers.
That pretty much says it all. Belief isn’t a talent or an educational advantage. It’s the unblocker of human power, and power is what this is all about. The leader who said this knew it from a career of overcoming obstacles with extraordinary teams of ordinary individuals under the worst kinds of stress. And he didn’t mean the irrational, unhinged kind of belief. He meant the rational, confident, competent kind.
Belief channels the power that is born inside every one of us; the ultimate national resource if we are willing to tap it.
Belief starts when we get an eyewitness look at the real barriers, the fears and doubts that hold us back, and the depth of our own power to overcome it. It enables us to take the first step and start feeling the essence.
As Graham would say, “Employees in Entrepreneurial companies begin to believe when they feel like a valued member of a winning team on an inspiring mission—when their work gives them a chance to touch greatness.” Such missions are built in places where the entrepreneur’s vision is kept alive each day, places that lead members based on their strengths rather than trying to squelch their weaknesses.
Today we need to liberate every ounce of power and belief we’ve got. We need entrepreneurship in companies ranging from small start-ups to major corporations. It will change how employees think about their careers and how employees and customers are managed. It will shift the center in capitalism to what we would call Human Capitalism.
This book exposes and explores the secrets of starting and staying on that most vital and rewarding of paths—that of the entrepreneur—and how those who succeed at unblocking their entrepreneurial power become the UnStoppables.
A WORD ABOUT LANGUAGE
As we’ve explained, this book originated in a journey of discovery shared by author Bill Schley and Rackspace Chairman Graham Weston. But the language and descriptions throughout are Bill’s work, except in those places where Graham is quoted by name. The editorial “we” and “us” used in presenting the argument refers to all of us, author and readers, who are exploring the nature of entrepreneurship together. We hope you enjoy the process.
Take the power of believing. Accept that fear, risk, and failure are vital for achieving. This makes people UnStoppable.
1 Start-Up Nation—term popularized by the superb book by that title.
Part I
Big Ideas About You
Chapter 1
Who Is an Entrepreneur and What Do They Do, Really?
WE NEED TO NAIL DOWN OUR DEFINITION of entrepreneur right now or our plane will never leave the gate. There are as many definitions as there are books, blogs, and helpful aunts. But they seldom agree and they set false expectations, and that stops a lot of people from starting.
The number one myth is that you need to be a genius like Steve Jobs, or a visionary who goes around all day seeing things that others don’t see, or a lone rider control freak who either has to be CEO or nothing, or a daredevil who basks in risk. People also believe all entrepreneurs must have access to a financial stash that others don’t (such as venture capital—VC—investment money), have some specialized knowledge or education, and start with a complete, fail-safe plan that’s guaranteed to succeed.
That’s all wrong—by around 180 degrees.
Most people are startled by the findings that author and professor Amar V. Bhide uncovered in one of the most extensive studies on the subject. Bhide explains that the vast majority of start-ups that eventually make it to the Inc. 500 list of fastest-growing private companies began like this:
no new technology or breakthrough idea
$10,000 of friends and family financing
little or no formal planning
opportunistic adaptation instead of vision—that is, they reacted as much as they acted.
