Talking Story with Say Leadership Coaching

Perspectives on Finding your Calling

Lisa Haneberg collected some great references in a post she wrote this past Friday on something we’ve talked about all month long; finding your calling.

I think we make things more complex than they have to be sometimes. If you read books or articles about people who have done this, they often share the same basic steps - they created a plan, then worked the plan.

Some people take a lifetime to figure out their calling. Some never do. Doing cool stuff now. That has great appeal. Perhaps it is not about determining the calling, but about actualizing a calling. Perhaps it is about taking a look at the things you are drawn to, things that naturally come easy to you, and things you love, and determining which is most actionable? Then acting.
— Lisa Haneberg

If you are struggling with any of these questions and want to add to the perspectives that Tom and I have shared with you this month, I encourage you to click into Lisa’s Management Craft and to these other links she’d offered:

Lifehacker: Turn your hobby into a career
Crossroads Dispatches: So what now? Responding to our calling.
Management Craft: Calling my calling!

And don’t forget: Finding Your Calling is Chapter One of Tom’s book. I’d recommend you start there if you haven’t read it yet.

Your entrepreneurial point of view: a gift for growth

What have you done with your Ho‘olaule‘a gift so far? Did you tuck it away in the back of your mind, or have you allowed it to begin its magic for you?

For many years I was content to be a very good manager for other leaders. I never thought I could be a visionary leader, or a budding entrepreneur and business owner, because I didn’t have a novel, earth-shattering mega idea.

I was wrong.

You may be too. Or you may be that person with an entrepreneurial point-of-view who still thrives in corporate business. Do you know which person you are?

You’ll never know for sure, if you don’t ask yourself the questions that will help you to find out.

Our Ho‘olaule‘a gift to you this month is a chance to find out your answer sooner versus later. It’s an invitation to your journey of self-discovery.
—Excerpt, Our August Ho‘ohana is Ho‘olaule‘a; Celebration!

If you accepted this gift of an entrepreneurial mindset which Tom and I hoped you would, I am very confident that you are viewing the job you now hold through fresh eyes, and with an embrace of new learning no matter what working environment you may be in. Despite your tenure there, you will have succeeded at banishing the passion killers of boredom, complacency, and apathy. The light at the end of your tunnel has become brighter, warmer, and more welcoming.

Readers of Managing with Aloha know there is some tough love in my book. Lisa mentioned it in her book review. My coaching clients will tell you it also emerges in my coaching if I begin to hear any traces of “oh woe is me” creep into their voices; I will not commiserate with them or accept their excuses. Instead, I will coach them to move beyond that first impulse and better consider the power they themselves have within their own circle of influence. The question becomes, Well, what are you going to do to make things better? How will you get something better to happen?

As a management philosophy, managing with Aloha actually solves problems pretty easily. The harder task is allowing it to influence greater ambition when people feel that things are okay and fine as they are; when they are willing to settle. As a coach I usually have a more optimistic view of their capacity and potential than they do; I see a brighter future for them than they see for themselves. And please understand that vision I see is not necessarily about a promotion, a better title, or a lucky leap into a lifestyle of luxury; it’s about living a happier and more fulfilling life within the passion of the work they have chosen to do. It’s about taking the strengths they have from good to great. It’s about being able to enthusiastically and confidently answering the question of what their true calling is.

And it’s about trusting in their own wild and wooly ideas and not allowing them to die.

Let’s look at some other ways in how Tom’s Startup Garden synchronizes so beautifully with Managing with Aloha.

Climbing the Entrepreneurial Decision Tree

Aloha mai kākou,

Up to now Tom and I have tried to tempt all you would-be entrepreneurs out there, hoping you’ll jump into the excitement of a new startup and share that great idea you have with the rest of the world. You can be brave, and know that we support you and want to encourage you. If you are not ready to take the plunge into self-employment, don’t wait to begin planning for the inevitable: There is still much you can do today, to create your future the way you want it to turn out.

Well, what about those of you who have made the jump? Have you been thinking you might not need Tom’s Startup Garden because you have already taken several first steps? The article that Tom has written for Talking Story today is for you --- and I am in this canoe right along with you! Have you really answered all the questions that should hold up the fruiting branches of your entrepreneurial decision tree? Let’s see... Tom writes more for us today.
—Rosa

Unlike Tolstoy’s families, happy startups are not all alike. There’s no one set path that ensures success for any venture, and in fact no two companies can make the same claim to fame. Which is a good thing.

Does that mean entrepreneurs should embrace randomness as a strategy and strive to do everything their own way? To sally forth impetuously and make decisions immediately so as to realize their dreams? No. This simply means that there’s an underlying framework, a general timetable and lifecycle that should inform the decisions of any company-builder.

As you grow your startup in an organic process, you must be willing to adapt to market conditions, customer feedback, and the various slings and arrows of entrepreneurial fortune. This calls for confidence, flexibility, and a forward-looking approach.

However, you must also realize that you will be presented with critical choices during the early stages of your startup. Some of these will be explicit, while others will quietly present themselves without tapping you on the shoulder to announce their import and consequence. You must be aware of these choices and their consequences, for while there is no right or wrong answer, you will garner immense control over the company of your choice by understanding these choices when they present themselves. And the key point here is that whether you make these decisions consciously or not, you will be making these choices nonetheless. And there are irrevocable consequences to each.

Starting a business is a process of execution that begins at the moment of conception—when you get that “aha” moment. At the same time, you are often building the groundwork for its success long before the specific enterprise emerges as a named, planned (planned), deliberate and structured set of activities.

There is a science metaphor called late and early binding choices. In some chemical formulas, elements bind together early and cannot be changed later in the process. The same principle applies to startups: once you’ve made a few critical decisions about the company that bind together, you may find it impossible to undo them.

And so dynamic startups must manage the quality of cognitive dissonance—the ability to hold two opposing ideas together, in harmony. Yes, great startups are adaptive, responsive, able to capitalize on opportunities immediately and without limits. Yet these qualities are mitigated and bounded by a set of rules. The founders must still build in financial, technical, and people skills that are aligned with the corporate goals; they must have given the company great flexibility by being extremely disciplined about what cannot change.

Learning in an entrepreneurial setting is a heuristic process. The situation itself teaches you what to do and how to learn. You can only learn how to play the game by being in the game, and you can only figure out how to make one specific decision after having made several others.

What do I mean, you ask. Well, here’s a rough framework to help you make the right decisions at the right time.

What does ‘financial literacy’ mean to you?

In our talk story Friday, Tom Ehrenfeld mentioned how something really bothers him:

“…the creation of a new class of people who are in permanent debt. Between the relaxation of standards for credit card companies (which now charge usurious rates and an ever-escalating array of fees and penalties), the changes in bankruptcy laws, and the conversion of the debt counseling field from one of small local charitable agencies to virtual storefronts for for-profit hucksters, it’s bad. There are already alarming discrepancies in this country in the allocation of wealth, and the credit epidemic is eviscerating what’s left of the middle class. Obviously I believe in free markets and in enterprise, but not to the extent to which we’re producing debt peons.”

Well Tom is certainly not alone in his concern. This morning, I saw this headline in our Honolulu Advertiser, pulled from the Associated Press:

Experts see crisis in growing U.S. Debt
By journalist Robert Tanner

You owe $145,000. And the bill is rising every day.

That’s how much it would cost every American man, woman and child to pay the tab for the long-term promises the U.S. government has made to creditors, retirees, veterans and the poor.

And it’s not even taking into account credit card bills, mortgages — all the debt we’ve racked up personally. Savings? The average American puts away barely $1 of every $100 earned.

Our profligate ways at home are mirrored in Washington and in the global marketplace, where as a society we spend $1.9 billion more a day on imported clothes and cars and gadgets than the entire rest of the world spends on its goods and services.

Entrepreneurship: Get started. Make the call.

Aloha, and mahalo for reading Talking Story! Welcome to our August Ho‘olaule‘a.

This is Part Four of my interview with Tom Ehrenfeld, business journalist, and author of The Start Up Garden, How Growing a Business Grows You.
Part One. Part Two. Part Three.

Rosa:
The Startup Garden was published in 2002. Now, three years later, do you see any significant changes would-be entrepreneurs must be aware of, or place added emphasis on? Any thoughts on what another chapter might be if you were to release a new edition?

Tom:
Other than the passing of the dot-com bubble, which I referred to earlier, I don’t believe the state of startups is all that different. I guess I’d say that the only thing that’s different is me, in the sense that I’ve grown a few years since then. And perhaps my lesson of the past few years deals with a humble admiration for the folks who simply get done that which they say they will do. That’s part of what excites me so much about entrepreneurs in the first place, and it’s a quality I continually seek to improve in myself.

As for what I might do differently with the book, well, I think the one thing I would do is add a chapter titled “The Entrepreneurial Decision Tree” and it would chart the key decisions that you make as an entrepreneur whether you realize you are making them or not. There are a handful of essential decisions that get made early on and are very hard to undo later. The first is probably deciding the scale of your venture: will it be a modest, homespun and stable type of business; what some call a ‘lifestyle’ business. (I don’t like the term but accept it as a label for many companies.) Because while the vast majority of ventures fit in this field, many founders make decisions as if they are chasing venture capital and hypergrowth. Big mismatch and a recipe for disaster. The next key decision on this path is the choice of investors; the vast majority of businesses are self-financed. But even so, those that receive funds must carefully match the source and amount with the most natural future.

More from Tom! Scale, Scope, Size and Song?

Aloha, and mahalo for reading Talking Story! Welcome to our August Ho‘olaule‘a.

This is Part Three of my interview with Tom Ehrenfeld, business journalist, and author of The Start Up Garden, How Growing a Business Grows You.
Part One. Part Two.

Rosa:
Tom what do you see as the definite advantages of the small business owner? How do they have an edge? What kind of opportunities do they have that they themselves tend to miss seeing?

Tom:
I think that small business owners have the advantage of being closer to the market, closer to the customer, than large companies. This is a truism that will probably always remain so. I think the issue here is tied to the founder (or founder’s spirit)’s presence in the company. Many businesses are launched by charismatic individuals (or teams) who are intimate with a product, a service, a market niche; and the business thrives because they worry that field like a dog with a bone. Even as the business grows, it remains vibrant so long as it stays connected and delivers what that customer wants, even as tools and trends and so many things change.

But again, I think the issue goes back to what I discussed earlier, which is the need for small business owners to take a multi-faceted approach to the business. They need to keep it all together in their heads, or better yet, in the formal systems that they can access and share with the people in the business. These can be simple financial tools, the development of a simple metric for success (did we ship X number of gallons of ice cream this week? Are we converting X number of calls into real sales?), and a basic recap of how the business is doing in the market, in the public eye, with feedback from customers.

The key idea to me about the blurring of small and large business has to do with the idea of business metabolism—the rate at which the venture eats, breathes, grows, evolves. While most companies still live in the world of Newtonian physics, meaning they are humble and manageable and predictable, thank you very much, I would concede that several recent trends qualify more companies to behave out of the ordinary—the quantum world of business I suppose.

Tom Ehrenfeld on MBAs and the Entrepreneurial Mindset

Aloha, and mahalo for reading Talking Story! Welcome to our August Ho‘olaule‘a.

This is Part Two of my interview with Tom Ehrenfeld, business journalist, and author of The Start Up Garden, How Growing a Business Grows You.

Rosa:
There has been much debate on the value of business school, and if an MBA is worth the time and effort it takes versus jumping right into corporate life and gaining first hand experience. What kind of reinvention in business school curriculum is necessary to best serve the potentially emerging entrepreneur? Besides instilling a love of lifelong learning (and hopefully they do that at minimum) how can business schools provide students with the best jumpstart?

Tom:
Funny you should ask about business schools. While I never got an MBA, I worked for almost three years as an editor at Harvard Business Review, which is published by HBS, and so I had a first-hand look at the process. In short my feeling is this: a business degree absolutely teaches a few important skills, the most important of which are probably the ability to craft a strategic eye and the skills to parse a balance sheet—to use finance as a tool. But otherwise I am very cynical about the general education, and believe that it’s probably best for individuals who go to graduate school to study a field in which they will probably do business: biochemistry, electrical engineering, forestry, macrame, cooking, design. I think it’s much easier to develop the appropriate business skills to serve a vibrant startup (which delivers a great product) than it is to conceive a great product/service to plug into your high-powered but generic entrepreneurial vehicle.

Tom Ehrenfeld’s Ho‘ohana and Kaona

Aloha, and mahalo for reading Talking Story! Welcome to our August Ho‘olaule‘a.

This is Part One of my interview with Tom Ehrenfeld, business journalist, and author of The Start Up Garden, How Growing a Business Grows You.

About this post’s title: Ho‘ohana is the passion, purpose, and intent that someone brings to what they do, and Tom explains his. Kaona, is hidden meaning; it is a word to indicate there is a story behind an event, a place, or a name. Again, Tom reveals another story behind the writing of his book. Thus my preference at times for Hawaiian words: fewer words, more meaning! 

Rosa:
I recently listened to the video presentation Marcus Buckingham did for Amazon.com’s 10th Anniversary, and in it, he says he believes that every author writes a book that they need to read, one to answer their own burning question. Was that true for you with The Startup Garden?

Tom:
As a matter of fact, I don’t completely agree with Marcus’s argument as it relates to business books. Most business books are written to teach and instruct, to help the readers get something done in their business lives. While each business book should be necessary—that is the author should feel compelled to write it—and while each business book should feel unique—that is, it should feel like no other author could have written this one book—there are also many business books that are somewhat less impersonal yet deliver value nonetheless. My favorite business books manage to blend the instructional with the personal (a good example would be Managing by the Numbers, a spirited guide that teaches companies how to instill financial literacy among its employees.)

Having said that....I wrote the Startup Garden for several reasons—to share what I had learned about entrepreneurship over the course of writing about it for Inc. magazine and other outlets for a number of years, to confirm a certain belief that had been growing in me about the process, and to produce a book that I considered different from other guides for would-be company-builders. I feel like I wrote the book I wanted to. But on other hand, I also believe that you always hold a little something back in a non-fiction book designed to help others. You have to balance a sense of being true to your beliefs, and being true to reality.

We Talk Story with Tom Ehrenfeld this week!

I had previously announced that Monday, August 15th would be the day of my interview with Tom Ehrenfeld, business journalist and author of The Startup Garden. Slight change of plans: We will be talking story with Tom all week long!

Once our interview started, I found it incredibly difficult to stop, for talking to Tom is, well, you’ll read for yourself why. Let me just say that you are in for a treat, and I have much mahalo (gratitude and appreciation) for Tom’s generosity in sharing his time and his honest mana‘o (thoughts, convictions and beliefs) with all of us this month, especially in light of what he currently has going on already. If this is not an extraordinary Virtual Ho‘olaule‘a, (celebration) and you can imagine a better one, I’d like to hear about it!

Meet Tom as the Mea Ho‘okipa he is, the giving host.

In agreeing to this format, Tom has opened the door to talking story with all of you too. Thus my decision to spill our interview over into installments throughout the week: You will soon see how each interview segment is incredibly rich with the possibilities for more discussion.

I encourage you to jump into the comment conversation this week: If you have never done so on a blog before, there is no better time, with the bonus of feeling the aloha of our entire Ho‘ohana Community of readers. I know that personally I’ll have to restrain myself and give the rest of you a turn!

We get started tomorrow as promised. Today, I’ll end with some quick links you can use as reference points, or to catch up with us if you are just clicking in (so be sure to open the extention of this post). I’ll also be updating this entry all week long as a Table of Contents for our future reference, with a home-page resident link parked for you in the Lōkahi features column to the right.

Let’s Talk Story!

How growing a business grows you

Book Review: The Startup Garden by Tom Ehrenfeld

Unless this is the first time you’ve clicked in (you can catch up with us here) you know that I’m a management coach, and I have my own business.

Today, my direction as an entrepreneur is crystal clear to me; I’m driving on a well-lit road. The mission statement for Say Leadership Coaching was easy for me to write, and every time I read it I am even more certain of the course I’ve charted for myself. The first draft of my Business Plan was done in less than a day’s time.

Yet two short years ago and recently unemployed, I was sitting on the floor in a Borders Bookstore with only very vague ideas of what I was going to do next. I was writing Managing with Aloha at the time, however I knew first-time authors don’t make a living on the books they write — if they manage to get them published at all — and I needed to do something more. But what?

I’d been in business for all my working life, but always for someone else. I had always thought of myself as a good manager, but not as the leader with the BIG IDEA. So while I was very confident I knew how to run a business, the problem for me was figuring out what business to run. Despite all my previous experience, which was pretty substantial, all I knew with 100% certainty was that I wanted to work for myself from that day forward. For me, it was more than about time, it was long overdue.

Gotcha thinking now!

Love it Dave, just love it.

The Deli Kid

By David E. Rothacker on Change / Innovation

“This is about the entrepreneurial mindset and beyond.”

Read the rest, and think about being a Deli Kid.

Think about being his manager.

Think about Deli Kids infecting an entire new generation at work.

Why The Startup Garden?

Had an after-work front porch visit with a good friend Friday evening. She’s just begun to read Talking Story regularly, and “Why The Startup Garden?” was the question she asked me into our second brew. “Why does it figure so prominently into your Ho‘olaule‘a this month?”

My husband had been talking story with us, and he muttered “She had to ask,” under his breath before announcing it would be a good time to see if he could catch the early evening news, and escaped.

As I explained my why to D. it occurred to me that I should do so here on Talking Story too, and best before the book review I promised you tomorrow. After writing this blog for a year now I do assume we have my past history together, and I’ll err (by not giving you enough information) on the side of not wanting to sound repetitious or preachy. There are certain subjects I fully realize I have soap-box tendencies with, and having an entrepreneurial mindset is one of them.

Let’s see if I can make this to the point, short and sweet. You can bet this will be an exercise in self-editing … lucky you to only see the finished product … :-)

Let’s get on with it! Ho‘olaule‘a prizes :)

I promised you a Ho‘olaule‘a this month, because we’ve got some celebrating to do. Now that all the burning issues are behind us, Let’s get on with it!

We have Ho‘olaule‘a prizes!

To win a prize, all you have to do is read Talking Story this month and celebrate along with us, wishing a happy year One to Talking Story, and a happy happy year Two to Say Leadership Coaching. Then we’ll see if you can answer some questions.

Mark this date: On Wednesday, August 31st I’ll be posting a very short trivia quiz at exactly 7:00am Hawaii Pacific Time. The first people to email me with the correct answers will win the prize of their choice.

Easy. No tricky Hawaiian words to decipher, promise.

The Prize Line-up

Personally, I think all of these prizes are equally wonderful (yes, I am biased and I admit it) so first to win will have their first choice, then second, then third etc. until our prizes are all claimed. We have 9 aloha-full, fantabulous prizes:

Tom Ehrenfeld and The Startup Garden

I have the enormous good fortune to have a wonderfully knowledgeable accomplice this month with my Ho‘olaule‘a Ho‘ohana!

His name is Tom Ehrenfeld, and he is the author of our Talking Story Book of the Month, The Startup Garden, How Growing a Business Grows You.

Tom is a business journalist and former writer/editor at Harvard Business Review and Inc. His work has also appeared in The New York Times and Boston Magazine. He is a frequent speaker on small business issues, and in Blogsville we have recently come to know him as a guest author on the 800-CEO-Read Blog.

Tom and I met back in June via email, after I had snagged one of his 800-CEO-Read Reviews on Stephen Covey’s The 8th Habit for Talking Story. My post was short, but there was a spirited comment conversation thereafter, and much to my delight Tom jumped back into it with us. Tom Ehrenfeld was now a talking story member of our Ho‘ohana Community!

Tom’s name was familiar to me because I had read his book about two years earlier. I remember spending a good two hours in Borders Bookstore one morning, sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of their business book section devoted to Entrepreneurship and Small Business. I pulled nearly every book off those bottom three shelves and previewed them, and when I had made my selections and walked to the cashier, The Startup Garden was one of only two books which had made the cut.