A respite from the next round of esoteric impractical thinking…

• Zach Klein, commenting on the Feltronification of Tumblr:

  It’s not the infographics on the page that interest me, rather it’s the trend of emphasizing a user’s popularity on the network. Lamentably, I think this metric will come to define the experience for the next generation of social networks. The internet’s utility for many people will equate to constant awareness of one’s value, and the play of meaningless games to increase the sum. This in turn will render many networks impersonal and irrelevant.

  Displaying social data changes social behavior; most of our statistics publicized by our various social networks, blogs and other websites measure and encourage talking rather than listening; with the increasing ease of broadcasting or “contributing” via sharing, “liking” or reblogging, is the discussion getting dumbed down? In response, should we raise the bar of the conversation, make it harder to create and publish, or find better ways to filter through the noise?

• Mike Speiser, Diversification = Mediocrity:
  

  Proponents of diversification argue that it takes the edge off of making a mistake. That would be a good argument if people acted the same way independent of their ownership in an outcome. But human beings do alter their behavior based on how much skin they have in the game. When costs and benefits are divided amongst too many, accountability is lost. Excessive diversification makes participants passive, dependent on the actions of others who are dependent on the actions of others, and so on. A free rider at best and a sucker at worst.

  Read the rest of the post; also, vaguely reminds me of one of the lessons I’ve learned through failure.

• Noah Brier, Neuroscience and the Creativity of Connections:
  

  Essentially it’s been my feeling that the best ideas really just come from people paying attention to the stuff that doesn’t make any sense. While most of the world ignores or gets angry when things don’t work, inventors see an opportunity to fix a problem (or at least think about why things are the way they are).

  How do we rectify the need to focus and the need to explore?

• My comment, reblogged, in response to a video about Jay Parkinson describing Hello Health:
  

  Very cool indeed; instead of changing the entire system, [Jay Parkinson]’s creating a new system [via Hello Health] that works around the existing; it will start in current un-served and under-served segments and spread to the currently mis-served segments once they realize how much better the solution is; a “quiet” revolution from the quiet masses; I’m excited.

  Very meta.

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Destination or Journey | Santa Fe, New Mexico | Feb 2009

The destination is the same, but the journey is far different.

Given the choice, which route do you take?

Which is more important: the process or the result? The journey or the destination?

A reminder: How to Fail: 25 Lessons Learned through Failure…

Roger Ehrenberg, Markets, Politics and Change:

Throwing $25 billion at the U.S. auto sector is akin to the $25 billion thrown at Citigroup; money flushed down the toilet. With over $100 billion of legacy pension and health care costs, a lack of globally competitive, fuel efficient cars and bloated cost structures, the U.S. auto industry as we know it has to die. Putting politics aside, it is simply foolish to pander to the UAW and their lobbyists by trying to save an industry that can’t be saved. Let’s take this opportunity through the bankruptcy process to purge unnecessary costs, sell valued assets to the private sector and re-purpose a skilled labor force towards infrastructure projects that can benefit the economy. Obama needs to make a stand that he is up for doing right, not simply thanking those who donated huge dollars and expect repayment – fast.

I can’t bear to watch or read the news about the automotive industry’s attempt to strip-mine taxpayers and the government. The automotive industry needs to fail first to succeed. Please don’t let the automotive companies, lobbyists and entrentched interests convince the government to delay the inevitable. We don’t need to flush billions of dollars into the pockets of the sycophants of a failing industry. Please.

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Random
Why do we constantly compare our current economic situation to the Great Depression?

We’ve all seen and read tons of articles and academic papers discussing our current economic situation, many with titles similar to “Worse than the Great Depression”. But we live in a massively different economic and geopolitical world than the 1930s-40s and the answers to our current problems are very different than those faced during the Great Depression.

Comparing our current economic situation to the Great Depression creates the wrong frame.

I’m not a practicing economist, so if I’m wrong, please tell me. I’d love to know why I’m wrong: I’m here to learn.

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What do I read for economic analysis? Mostly:

• Information Arbitrage: Roger Ehrenberg
• Marginal Revolution: Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok
• Paul Kedrosky
• The Big Picture: Barry Ritholtz

And, of course, a lot of other sources that might not make immediate sense to everyone…

What can you learn from peoples’ stories of startup and entrepreneurial success and failure?

A lot.

But listen carefully.

Encased in anyone’s story, lesson or example of success and failure is the bias created by their own experiences: what they noticed and learned, the choices they made, the insights they gleaned and the conclusions they drew.

But that’s just a part of the story:

• What did they neglect to notice?
• How much of the results can be attributed to their decisions, strategy and tactics and how much is due to just their environment? (i.e. were they lucky or good?)
• What lessons did they not not pick up? What conclusions did they fail to draw?
• What “unknown unknowns” stayed unknown?
• What special insights or attributes did they bring that you won’t be able to match?
• What could you have done better if you were in their shoes?
• How can you separate the strategies they adopted from the tactics they used?

Entrepreneurs, just like everyone else, develop biases based on their experiences. And our biases are an important part of our messages…

Perhaps it’s the viewpoint and knowledge, the sum of the experiences and wisdom that forms the bias, that contains the most valuable part of the message.

… but they have to be used carefully. Our knowledge, education and experiences form how we create solutions. We develop biases and frames of reference to help us understand new situations and solve new questions.

But we tend to use the tools we know. If I’ve got a hammer, I’ll probably use a hammer. But what if I need a wrench? What if the answer is really a flute? What if the solution is really a tool I’ve never heard of?

The point is not to get rid of our biases: our biases can be incredibly valuable if we recognize where they exist, how they were formed and how they shape us.

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Friends and colleagues have asked me if I could create a repeatable “blueprint” or process for evaluating and executing a startup idea: a strategic framework and decision-making process resulting in a template business plan, financial model and investor pitch deck.

Yes, I could, and I’ve started doing that (download XLS template financial model) but it’s only valuable as a starting point, not as the end result.

There’s a bit of art to the science of creating a business plan and a financial model: the value is created not by the output but through the process.

Creating new ideas depends on people, not the process. The value is in the process of questioning, analyzing, evaluating and breaking down a business into its core: assumptions, variables, drivers, equations, relationships, bets, risks and mysteries. And this process depends on people sharing their ideas, bases of knowledge, biases and frames of reference, not from using a template “fill-in-the-blank” business plan.

The bigger value is in being able to step past our narrow spheres of knowledge and connect to broader ideas and experiences. Instead of adhering to our biases, bring them together to clash and create. A template doesn’t do that: people do.

That’s what I do. But it also takes you.

Inspired in part by “How to Fail”, Valeria Maltoni created a personal list of “25 Ways to Fail and Come Out on Top”. Her in-depth personal list of lessons from business and life adds many new points to the conversation about learning from failure, and I wanted to take the time to bring out a couple points that resonated with me.

Don’t let planning stop us down from starting:

1/ Lean into the Project – being a team player is great, but sometimes all the meeting and planning slow you and your team down. By the time you are called to implement, there is no juice left in you or your team.

… Some of the planning and process mania is a placebo for managing risk. The other placebo effect is trying to get everyone on the same page. How about working it, leveraging people’s passion, and pushing through the dip?

Opposition is a positive signal:

15/ Embrace resistance – if everyone agrees and nobody pushes back, it’s not different enough. I’ve also come to believe that opposition is often an indication that you’re onto something. Have you found that to be true?

This is also valid for listening to those who disagree with you. They are going to teach you something you did not know before.

Share:

21/ Share what you know with others – let them build on it, improve it, amend, give you feedback. This is not only valid for social media. It works in many areas of work and life. Success is becoming more and more about social capital and trust, and not about keeping the cards close to the vest.

My own personal problem right now?

22/ Take on only so many projects – yes, this will probably be a problem in organizations where people are expected to be “jacks of all trades”. But you know what they say to complete that sentence you are “master of none”.

When you don’t leverage your strengths, you find yourself off balance and ineffective.

More on producing rather than perfecting:

25/ Stop trying to be perfect – this was the underlying message of The Big Moo and it is our grand finale. When you work hard at being perfect you miss all of the great ways to fail your way to success.

What’s the biggest thing you’ve learned through failure?

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How can you read “How to Fail”?

• Read on the web.
• Download the eBook PDF.
• Read (and download) the PowerPoint presentation on Slideshare.

Continuing to revisit the underlying themes behind “How to Fail”…

Following up on the concept of over-optimization, another key concept underlying “How to Fail” is the idea to focus on producing instead of perfecting.

People aren’t perfect: why do we expect anything we create to be perfect?

Even if perfection did exist, do you think we would be able to recognize, understand, value and remember it?

Why are we uncomfortable with letting people see our imperfections?

Obviously we don’t want to deliver products and services riddled with errors, mistakes and processes: people don’t care about our problems, they only really care about their own. But we understand that mistakes happen. Own up to it, apologize and fix it: as a company and a person.

Put your quest for perfection to the side and get something out there that solves distinct needs fantastically well, then iterate, iterate, iterate to refine.

In the end, it’s possible to succeed without perfection, but it’s impossible to succeed without producing. Focus your time on what matters.

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Do you have an idea on how to condense the 25 Lessons learned through failure? Poipes took a shot in a blog comment on Killer Startups. What do you think?

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How can you read “How to Fail”?

• Read on the web.
• Download the eBook PDF.
• Read (and download) the PowerPoint presentation on Slideshare.

Any company that adopts the phrase “Unf*** the world” as an organizing principle isn’t scared of trying new things.

Nau wasn’t scared. Nau started with grand goals to change the retail apparel industry model while creating a grand environmental sustainability and social responsibility movement. Earlier this year they failed: not because of the ideals, but because of the more mundane reasons: poor execution and not enough money.

But they’re back.

GOOD Magazine: What Nau?

The innovative clothing company Nau was supposed to transform the apparel industry. Instead, it tanked. So what went wrong, and what happens next?

Nau would soon go from sake-soaked dream to bona fide startup with more than 60 employees, $24 million in capital, and outsized buzz for its business practices. … It boasted an expert staff and stylish products. More important, its ideals differentiated the brand dramatically.

Barely a year after Nau’s clothing landed on store shelves in March, 2007, the company went belly-up, done in by overreaching ambition and a slumping economy.

Failure happens.

But it doesn’t always end that way. Business history is littered with examples: a company blazes in with a great idea, idea isn’t a winner in the marketplace, but instead of going under the company finds a way to channel the idea into another direction and finds success.

In June, [Gordon Seabury, the CEO of Horny Toad Activewear] bought what was left of the company for an undisclosed sum. This October, Nau will relaunch using the same farms and mills, with Verité continuing to monitor labor conditions. Already, the factories are cutting and sewing again. In its new life, Nau no longer has to worry about raising capital to birth a fully formed brand. Under Horny Toad, the company will grow organically, perhaps the way it should have from the start.

What changed? Thankfully, not the ideals or the commitment to sustainability, environmentally-friendly materials and social responsibility. But Nau has tightened up the execution model:

• The old stores are gone, as is the “webfront” retail model, replaced by a more traditional reseller model.
• The website (thankfully) is much faster and easier to use. The old website was a travesty for a company that based its business model on a transactional website.
• The plan to donate 5% of revenues to causes has been reduced to 2%, with fewer choices of nonprofits for customers.
• The growth plans have been scaled back and the company will focus on growing organically, relaunching with 100 less styles, less marketing and lower growth expectations.

Making everybody change they way they do things is hard. There’s a lot of value in it, but it rarely comes the way you originally plan. Be careful of the big bet; you can’t win if you aren’t in the game.

“If we have to leave some growth on the table in return for being a bit more cautious and successful in the long run, that’s okay,” Seabury says. “It’s all about lifetime impact, and you can’t have a lifetime impact unless you’re sustainable on the business side.”

We learn a lot more about ourselves through failure than success. Let’s hope you don’t have to learn as much as I have.

With so much interest in the “How to Fail: 25 Secrets Learned through Failure” post, I thought it would be valuable to revisit the lessons to point out underlying themes. Perhaps eventually we’ll be able to condense the twenty-five lessons (thanks for Matt for the thought)…

One of the core lessons behind “How to Fail” concerns our quest for optimization; we regularly grossly misjudge the costs and benefits of attempting to optimize our decisions. We use too much data, spend too much time planning and misjudge the opportunity costs of optimization. We regularly analyze data, structure decisions and make plans without benchmarking our past decision-making processes and results. We spend too much time answering the questions we know and too little time considering what questions we aren’t asking. Far too often we make unrealistic and unpractical attempts to foresee the future; even worse is that we create create plans without the flexibility to make easy changes or the redundancy to survive.

We regularly over-optimize even though we are usually wrong at predicting the future; and we attempt it again, and again, and again.

We are seeing the results of over-optimization crop up in the current economic environment: over-leveraged businesses, over-leveraged consumers, short term decisions and quarterly-focused profit maximization, all shaped by our incentives to optimize and the timing misalignments between risks and rewards. [1] Our attempts at local maximization create global minimization.

Can we develop better guides and practices to help us identify over-optimization? Can we learn from our mistakes?

I’m trying to learn from my mistakes and heed my own twenty-five lessons. In your experiences, what would be your #26?

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[1] I’m not saying it’s the ultimate cause, just one of the factors….

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How can you read “How to Fail”?

• Read on the web.
• Read (and download) the PowerPoint presentation on Slideshare.
• Download the eBook PDF.

Also…

• Just two more days to vote on my “Questions, Answered, Again” project.
• Right now I’m posting a series on the future of the photography business on my other website. The first two posts are up: Five Lessons: How Photographers Can Create New Business Models and Lesson 1: Photographers are your customers, not your competition.

As always, if you want to get updates on this projects and others, follow Unstructured Thoughts by RSS (as posted) or Email (max once daily).

I started to write about the keys of success for entrepreneurs and startups, but as I wrote I realized that while I’ve seen companies fail, projects flounder and ideas die, I’ve had little first-hand experience with success. My ideas on the keys to success remain just that: ideas.

But I’ve learned a lot through failure. Close observation and unfortunate first-hand personal experiences have taught me many lessons about why companies fail.

Let’s be clear: this is intended to be an assessment of the 25 most important lessons I have learned through failure, not a comprehensive analysis of all the reasons entrepreneurs and startups fail (and trust me, this is the shortened version: I’ve learned more than 25).

The first sixteen primarily address strategic and operational issues while the last nine deal more with management and organizational issues. Since I believe the three most important factors for any company are people, product and market, I’m not sure that I’ve come up with the “appropriate” ratio of ways to fail, but perhaps you’ll have ideas that will bring the ratio more in line. I’m looking forward to hearing about the secrets you’ve learned through failure.

• Click here to download the PDF PowerPoint presentation of this post (much nicer looking).
• Click here to read the PDF PowerPoint post on Slideshare (much nicer looking, streaming over the web, easy to share and embed.)
• UPDATED 10/1: Click here to download the eBook-style PDF of this post.
• Continue below to read on web (right here, right now).

How to Fail: 25 Secrets Learned through Failure

1. Dither, dither, dither; plan, plan, plan.
Instead: Fail fast. Fire, aim, repeat.

Time is the most valuable asset a person has, and yet it’s the easiest and most common thing wasted. Speed breeds momentum and passion, motivation and a bias for action. Learning through experience is far more valuable than learning through planning, prototyping or researching as nothing is more direct, meaningful and visceral than seeing how something works (or doesn’t).

What is the second-most important asset? Passion. People only have so much passion, intellect and interest to devote to ideas without seeing results, without seeing the fruit of their labour. Give people the chance to succeed and the opportunity to learn without drowning them in the process. Few things are more demotivating than working on a project for an extensive amount of time just to see it canceled shortly before it would have seen the light of day.

2. Postpone hard decisions until you have to make hard trade-offs.
Instead: Make decisions earlier to create options and build flexibility.

Make decisions before you think you need to. You’re probably too late if you come to the point where you realize you have to make a choice between hard trade-offs. By waiting to make a decision you’ve created trade-offs instead of options. Postponing decisions in the attempt to optimise your results is probably a waste of your resources in other ways.

3. Copy tactics.
Instead: Create strategies.

Blindly following the tactics and path of other companies is a sure route to failure. The right tactics are indelibly linked to the internal and external environments a company faced at a particular point in time. Companies regularly fail by adopting old business models or basing a business on artificially protecting old business models. Re-applying another company’s tactics neglects to consider the process and path they took to success.

Followers focus on tactics and tools rather than strategies and goals.

4. “Fight the good fight.”
Instead: Pick the right battles, at the right time, with the right people. *

There is a time and a place for everything. Make prudent decisions based on your present and future situation and capabilities rather than fighting every battle that comes your way. The hardest part for every startup is staying in the game, thus do everything you can do to stay in the game give yourself the opportunity for future success.

Implications:

• Leave big, systemic, intractable problems to big companies with the resources to get knocked down and get up again. Instead, solve simple problems (big and small) where you can have a direct impact.
• Let large companies create standards. Stay away from basing your success on re-creating the wheel for the industry. If your valuable, innovation solutions for your customers are meant to be industry standards, then they will naturally become the standards, but do not depend on systemic change for your success.
• Leave large, cross-industry partnerships between incumbents to large, established companies. Startups will almost always be caught between the old battles and priorities of established companies, better to not depend on having to solve their relationships for your success.

5. Solve your problems.
Instead: Solve their problems.

Alternate interpretation: Solve buyers’ problems instead of solving sellers’ problems.

Don’t create solutions that make things easier for you. Create solutions that solve problems for your customers and buyers; they typically don’t care about your own internal problems.

6. Focus on the long-term.
Instead: Focus on the short-term.

You exist in the short-term, you don’t know if you will in the long-term. Make decisions that matter now. In fact, your view of the long-term will probably be wrong; instead, make decisions now that build options that allow you to adjust to the inevitable differences between now and the future.

7. Build prototypes, mockups and samples.
Instead: Start building in a format and medium as close to the finished product as possible, and iterate, iterate, iterate.

Nothing saps the spirit more than creating mockups and designs without making progress toward a completed product. Most often the product cannot be created exactly as it is designed, and thus it is important to learn through working on the product itself, not the design.

Obviously different products require different levels of designing, blueprints and planning; but the focus should always be on the quality of the finished product and not the model.

8. Let data make decisions.
Instead: Use data to guide decisions.

There is always incomplete data whenever you create something new. In a world of incomplete information, data can help you make a decision but it must be treated as a guide to a decision, not the decision. You are more likely to neglect to evaluate an “unknown unknown” than you are to misjudge a “known unknown.” Spend your time wisely on asking the right questions rather than just coming up with the right answers.

9. Give customers everything they want.
Instead: Listen to customers, then throw (almost) all of it away.

Closely related to how to use data: one of the best advantages of a small company is that everyone interacts with customers or can directly see how customers are using their product or service (wait: not everyone does?).

Large companies are forced to split tasks, accountabilities and “strategy” up into small pieces by the very nature of being large. The increased interactions and interlocking tasks creates layers of decision-making and abstracts the tasks away from the impacts they have on customers.

If you are in a position where you cannot directly listen to a customer, talk to a customer or directly see what a customer is doing, then you’re too far away.

10. “New, New, New!”
Instead: F*** new. What’s different? What’s better?

Unless new adds something to the equation, new is not good enough. New is not enough to get people to switch; and if they are switching to you, it’s pretty likely they’ll switch away from you when you’re no longer new.

11. Leave money on the table.
Instead: Raise all the capital you should each time you’re at the trough.

More companies die through lack of capital than any other reason. Capital buys time and creates options; it allows you to stay in the game through the inevitable mistakes, misjudgments and external market shifts out of your control.

The key here is “should.” Raising small amounts of capital to test an idea or to get a quality investor involved or to validate the idea are all good reasons to raise smaller amounts of money; raising smaller amounts of money to optimise the valuation at the next fund-raising round is not a good reason. You’ll spend more money and more time than projected and you’ll be looking at a range of hard trade-offs in your next round of fund-raising.

Cash is king.

12. Optimise for the best-case scenario.
Instead: Build redundancy and plan for the worst-case scenario.

Projects take longer than planned. Production is more expensive than projected. Sales come slower than forecasted. Market conditions change, competitors shift gears.

The only guarantee is that things will change. Depending on the past to predict the future is a bad bet because the risk / reward trade-off is inevitably skewed; things are guaranteed to change, yet the rewards are poorly priced into current risk.

Create solutions for things that don’t change. Create a structure that allows you to stay in the game. Instead of depending on a step-by-step sequential plan, create alternate, parallel paths that allow you to adapt your various workstreams to the changing environment and marketplace.

13. Over-promise, over-sell, under-deliver.
Instead: Over-promise, over-sell, over-deliver.

The vast majority of startups fail because the problems they aim to solve exist for a reason. Aim high and deliver high, and if you can’t do that, then you probably won’t succeed. Justifying mistakes is merely rationalization.

However, “over-delivering” does not equal “doing more”. If you attempt to over-deliver by adding more and more features, more promises, more capabilities, you’re reducing your likelihood of delivering on any of them. Focus on the getting the minimum done exceptionally well.

When in doubt, do less.

14. Be stubborn in the face of failure.
Instead: Be determined in the face of disbelief.

The doubters are inevitable and the odds are stacked against entrepreneurs and startups, thus it is crucial to believe in yourself, your company and your solution. Yet that determination can become our biggest weakness when it manifests itself as stubbornness or inflexibility; we can learn more through failures than successes.

The difference between determination and stubbornness is the difference between ignoring people and ignoring results.

Flexibility is a virtue, not a weakness; error is inevitable, thus accept being wrong and make more mistakes to learn better and faster.

15. “We can build a successful business by capturing just X% of the market.”
Instead: Sell to one customer. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

It is impossible for a company or an employee to grasp “the market.” All of your potential customers face slightly different problems and nobody wants to be the “average customer” at the median of the market. Focus your attention and all of your employees on being the best solution for a single customer and grow by winning customer after customer.

By attempting to appeal to everyone, you’ll likely appeal to no one.

Know the difference between the mass market and the niche market and build your entire business on that understanding.

16. Depend on outsiders to make key decisions or develop key components.
Instead: Make your own key decisions and build your own core competitive advantages.

Outsourcing parts of your business is a key way to focus your time and attention on what matters; but be sure to keep your core competitive advantage in-house. The key decisions that affect the future of your business should be made by you and your company.

Consultants, partners and investors will simply make different decisions using their frameworks guided by their incentives and payoff structures, despite all good intentions.

Consultants can be valuable for large companies by exposing them to new ideas and processes and shaking up ingrained ways of doing business, but at a startup nothing is ingrained and creating new ideas and solutions should be the key part of your business. If you need a consultant to make a decision or build a solution for you, you’re making the wrong decisions or building the wrong solutions.

17. “I know more than anyone else.”
Instead: If you think you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re the fool.

If you are indeed the smartest person in the room, then you’ve picked the wrong people to work with. If you’re not the smartest person in the room but think you are, then you’re simply (usually disastrously) wrong.

Hire people smarter than you. Work with people smarter than you. Listen to them. Let them lead you. Take the blame for all failures, give away the credit for all successes.

18. A unanimous decision means we’re all right.
Instead: If everybody agrees, you’re probably all wrong.

Startups face big decisions in areas of uncertainty. If everyone takes the same decision using the same information then you’re probably not structuring the choices appropriately.

Expose yourself to a more diverse set of opinions and interpretations to re-structure the choices. Differences of opinion are warning signs for decisions; use these warning signals to identify the areas where you need to structure more options in your investment decisions. Since nobody really knows the exact path to success, build flexibility and don’t depend on everything to go right for success.

19. Hire resumes.
Instead: Hire people: curiosity, passion, interpersonal skills and drive.

Who would you rather work with: a resume or a person?

Remember that resumes are naturally biased, created and carefully manipulated by job-seekers as marketing devices.

Hire people you want to work with based on the traits, characteristics and behavior you see. It takes more time to hire people rather than resumes, but the risk and downside of hiring a poorly-suited person is higher than the downside of an empty position.

20. Create rules to outline decisions.
Instead: Create incentives to guide decisions.

Incentives align priorities. Rules do not create loyalty or empower employees. Instead of telling people what to do, outline goals and let them lead you to the destination. If you work with people smarter than you (and you probably do), then it’s important to listen and learn from them.

Give up control; you never really had it anyway.

21. Reward activity.
Instead: Reward achievements, both failures and successes.

Failure is an inevitable by-product of an innovative company, thus it’s important to reward people’s failures along with their successes. Ending a project can be as valuable as pushing forward, since misguided activity wastes resources, time and people’s passion.

While process is important, remember that it’s results that count. Academic exercises (efforts that will never be executed) are called “academic” for a reason.

22. Meet to discuss.
Instead: Meet to decide.

Meetings used to disseminate information are the biggest time-sink at almost all companies. Nobody likes meetings and the interruptions they create.

If you are meeting, structure an agenda that leads to a decision being made right then. Use other methods of communication to disseminate information and updates.

If you need meetings to “get everyone on the same page”, then you have bigger problems the meeting will probably not address.

23. Work under “understandings”.
Instead: Create legal agreements as soon as possible.

The process of creating legal agreements is more valuable than the resulting documents themselves. Creating legal agreements forces people to make clear decisions and eliminates the different perceptions and the illusion of agreement that “understandings” invariably create.

24. Everything matters.
Instead: Recognize the difference between “penny-wise” and “pound-foolish”.

Focus on what matters. “Penny-wise and pound-foolish” is a phrase that describes the tendency to focus on small, marginal-value things that we can see to the detriment of focusing more important, valuable but perhaps less-obvious options.

While the phrase is more generally used to describe investment decisions (e.g. spending time on evaluating ways to cut small expenses instead of focusing on larger profit opportunities), it applies to any resource investment: time, money, people, passion, intellect, focus, integrity.

And last but not least,

25. Treat these secrets as absolutes.
Instead: Know all the rules completely so you can break them perfectly.

I didn’t come up with this one. [1] But even if it’s a bit hokey, it’s true: there are very, very few absolutes in the world.

[1] Generally mistakenly attributed to the Dalai Lama. Google it.

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More:

• Read the PDF PowerPoint on Slideshare.
• UPDATED 10/1: Click here to download the eBook-style PDF of this post.

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* I’ll admit, this is probably my own biggest and most common personal failure.