Would you like to build a business that stands out from the competition? How can you create a company culture that drives innovation and sustainable growth?
In The Diary of a CEO, Steven Bartlett shares powerful insights about building successful enterprises. His wisdom covers everything from fostering experimentation to making strategic hires that propel your business forward.
Keep reading to discover how to start an innovative business that transforms your entrepreneurial vision into reality.
Starting an Innovative Business
Bartlett explains how to put major life goals and the right mindset into practice by building a thriving business. Let’s explore his advice for how to start an innovative business that’s optimized for prolonged success.
Tip #1: Encourage Employees to Experiment & Learn From Their Mistakes
Bartlett argues that experimentation should be a core component of any successful business strategy. Even if many of these experiments fail, every mistake provides crucial information that can inform future experiments and decisions. Ultimately, it only takes one wildly successful experiment to pay off the sunk cost of all the other failed experiments a thousandfold. For example, imagine a restaurant chain gives each location the freedom to add local specials to the menu. Most flop, but a few become hit dishes that are rolled out nationwide, driving massive sales growth.
Encouraging your employees to fail isn’t enough—design your company from the ground up to support frequent experimentation and mistakes. To do this:
- Make project teams as small as possible so they can organize themselves and make decisions quickly.
- Give these teams greater autonomy and access to resources.
- Streamline approval processes for experimental projects—especially for those that are low-risk and easily reversible.
- Measure how much employees are experimenting, and reward those who experiment the most with public recognition or promotions to management roles. (Promoting your most innovative workers will also encourage their teams to be more experimental.)
| Maximize Experimentation With Internal Startups In The Lean Startup, Eric Ries provides a more detailed breakdown of how large, established companies can maximize experimentation and rapid innovation. Ries recommends using internal startups: small teams that essentially operate as their own company. Each internal startup focuses on a single new product or service and includes workers from all the necessary functional departments: IT, marketing, and so on. This way, each internal startup can quickly gain approval from every department for any proposed changes, accelerating their innovation. Like Bartlett’s experimental teams, internal startups are almost entirely autonomous. However, unlike Bartlett, Ries recommends deliberately restricting internal startups’ resources so they’re under pressure to focus and succeed quickly. Additionally, whereas Bartlett recommends rewarding workers (with recognition or promotions) for all experimentation, regardless of outcomes, Ries’s system primarily rewards teams whose experimental startups are successful (with bonuses or profit sharing). This motivates workers to view the success or failure of their product or service as their personal success or failure, just like the founders of real startups. Like Bartlett, Ries believes that the potential rewards of such experiments outweigh their sunk costs. That said, he also recommends ways to reduce the potential harm caused by internal startups gone wrong. For instance, any tests that internal startups conduct should only impact a limited number of the parent company’s customers. Furthermore, if at any point their experiments seriously threaten the parent company’s business, those experiments must be immediately shut down. |
Tip #2: Focus on Tiny Upgrades
Businesses that conduct frequent experiments often reap the reward of huge groundbreaking innovations, but Bartlett also contends that innovations don’t have to be big and groundbreaking to radically improve your business. Rather, a multitude of tiny upgrades can achieve big results over time. For example, an online marketplace may run thousands of small A/B tests to determine the effect of subtle design changes on user behavior. Over time, these tiny changes result in an irresistible website that gives the company a huge competitive advantage.
Bartlett insists that, if you build your company’s culture around continuous tiny upgrades, eventually you’ll have a world-class business.
Likewise, Bartlett asserts that ignoring small details has the opposite effect: If you ignore little problems, their consequences will add up over time and cause major damage to your business. For example, a software company that dismisses every minor bug and user complaint as trivial will alienate its user base over time as the product becomes increasingly unusable.
Furthermore, Bartlett emphasizes that tiny upgrades serve as a powerful source of motivation for your team. As long as your employees feel like they’re successfully moving toward a goal, they’ll be motivated to keep going, even if progress is slow.
Tip #3: Constantly Predict What Could Go Wrong
We’ve established that many companies fail because they overlook countless tiny flaws—but surprisingly, a good number of companies also fail because they overlook enormous flaws. According to Bartlett, people subconsciously push away thoughts and feelings about bad things that could happen because thinking about them is so unpleasant. This means that when you’re running a business, your first instinct would be to avoid thinking about potential ways your company could fail and ignore any evidence that it has major flaws.
(Shortform note: Subconsciously pushing away unpleasant thoughts and feelings is known as repression. Unfortunately, repression is a short-sighted strategy that typically causes greater long-term emotional distress. Additionally, some research indicates that chronic repression can even lead to physical symptoms such as high blood pressure, fatigue, and headaches.)
Bartlett recommends regularly conducting premortems to compensate for this bias toward denial. A premortem is a proactive analysis of a business strategy’s potential flaws—as opposed to a postmortem, which is an analysis you conduct after a strategy has already failed.
First, imagine in detail a future in which your strategy has failed. Then, come up with as many explanations as you can for why it failed. Finally, adjust your strategy to make this negative future less likely, and come up with backup plans to reduce the potential downsides of negative outcomes. The premortem is most effective when you walk many relevant team members through this process together, allowing them to contribute insights.
| You Shouldn’t Try to Predict Everything In The Dichotomy of Leadership, Jocko Willink and Leif Babin argue that although conducting premortems and planning for what could go wrong helps avert painful disasters, overplanning—attempting to prepare a detailed response for every possible setback—can also be harmful. Taking the time to predict everything that could go wrong will severely slow you down. At a certain point, this wasted time becomes more costly than it’s worth. Additionally, overpreparing for unlikely events often causes its own problems. For example, Babin, a former Navy SEAL commander, discovered that when he assigned more soldiers than necessary to a task as part of a contingency plan, it endangered the mission—the team became more difficult to manage as it grew. For these reasons, Willink and Babin recommend limiting yourself to contingency plans for three to four things most likely to go wrong, as well as a plan for your worst-case scenario. |
Tip #4: Be Humble Enough to Hire People Better Than You
According to Bartlett, to build a successful business, you don’t need to master a vast range of skills. More than anything else, you need to be good at identifying, hiring, and retaining people with the skills you need. No matter how smart or capable you are, your business will be constrained by the limits of your knowledge, skills, and time. The only way to break through those constraints is by surrounding yourself with team members who shore up your weaknesses and expand your capabilities.
Many entrepreneurs make the mistake of overestimating the impact their skills and expertise have on whether their businesses succeed or fail. Consequently, they fail to invest enough effort in hiring the right people. Accept that you’re not as essential to your business’s success as you’d like to be, and focus your efforts on assembling the highest quality team you can. Additionally, make sure you create a working environment that allows them to do their best work.
| Every Expert You Hire Saves You Time and Money In Who Not How, Dan Sullivan argues that it’s not only impossible to learn and do everything necessary to build a successful business by yourself—it’s also a waste of time to do anything you’re not already an expert at. Hiring an expert saves you a significant amount of time that you’d otherwise spend painstakingly learning new skills, and you can use this extra time to improve your business in other ways. Sullivan explains that although it’s inefficient to do everything yourself, many entrepreneurs fall into this trap—not because of pride, but because they’re hesitant to pay someone to do something they could do themselves for free. However, he contends that every dollar you spend on expert employees is an investment that kickstarts an ever-expanding cycle of growth. As long as you make the purpose of your business clear, your personnel will continue to optimize and improve whatever processes they’re engaged in, generating better results faster and further improving your business. |
