Before writing my review about the book, I'll take advantage of one of the Kindle features and I'll share my highlightings of the book:
The Monk and the Riddle: The Art of Creating a Life While Making a Living (Randy Komisar and Kent Lineback)
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No matter how hard we work or how smart we are, our financial success is ultimately dependent on circumstances outside our control. (Ask any once high-flying startup that is currently looking for a life-saving round of financing in these bleak times.) In order to find satisfaction in our work,
therefore, we should train our attention on those things that we can influence and that matter to us personally.
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principal use of the plan comes at the beginning, I explained, to show that the founders are intelligent, capable of structuring the business concept and expressing a vision of the future. Later the plan can help track problems that may reflect on the startup strategy itself.
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Anyone can sail with the wind to his back. Startups usually sail into a stiff wind, leaking like a sieve, in high seas, without food or water.
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“My experience tells me if you do this for the money, you'll just end up howling at the moon. The money's never there until it's there. There must be something more, a purpose that will sustain you when things look bleakest. Something worthy of the immense time and energy you will spend on this, even if it fails.”
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You have to be able to survive mistakes in order to learn, and you have to learn in order to create sustainable success.
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business isn't primarily a financial institution. It's a creative institution. Like painting and sculpting,
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So why were they doing this? Why was it worth their time? I am always amazed that venture capitalists don't ask that question.
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It bothered me to see talented young people give up, or defer, their ideals in the hope of a fast buck that was unlikely to ever arrive.
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But knowing what we require to be willing to do something lifelong provides invaluable self-knowledge.
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Passion pulls you toward something you cannot resist. Drive pushes you toward something you feel compelled or obligated to do.
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Only passion will get you through the tough times.
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This one is very important, is about the Deferred Life Plan.
Its very structure—first, step one, do what you must; then, step two, do what you want—implies that what we must do is necessarily different from what we want to do. Why is that the case? In the Deferred Life Plan, the second step, the life we defer, cannot exist, does not deserve to exist, without first doing something unsatisfying.
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Working at companies like GO and WebTV convinced me that there is no margin in the consumer hardware business. It requires an enormous investment, demands massive distribution, and scales slowly. I believed the value of consumer hardware could be derived only from the services it delivered to the consumer and industry partners (in this case, advertisers, programmers, and networks).
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The chance to work on a big idea is a powerful reason for people to be passionate and committed. The big idea is the glue that connects with their passion and binds them to the mission of an organization. For people to be great, to accomplish the impossible, they need inspiration more than financial incentive.
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Business conditions are forever changing. You need to reconsider your strategies and business models constantly and adjust them where necessary. But the big idea that your company pursues is the touchstone for these refinements. Ditching the big idea in order to deal with business exigencies leaves you without a compass.
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The culture you create and principles you express are the only connection you will have with each other and your many constituencies.
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Management and leadership are related but not identical. Lenny's vantage point from the bowels of the Borg, though, had never given him an appreciation for the difference.
Management is a methodical process; its purpose is to produce the desired results on time and on budget. It complements and supports but cannot do without leadership, in which character and vision combine to empower someone to venture into uncertainty. Leaders must suspend the disbelief of their constituents and move ahead even with very incomplete information.
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I liked being the leader better than being the guy who made the trains run on time. I found that the art wasn't in getting the numbers to foot, or figuring out a clever way to move something down the assembly line. It was in getting somebody else to do that and to do it better than I could ever do; in encouraging people to exceed their own expectations; in inspiring people to be great; and in getting them to do it all together, in harmony. That was the high art.
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For me, the moral of the story of Steve Perlman and WebTV is the need to emphasize visionary leadership over management acumen in the formative stage of a startup. If you turn a visionary startup into an operating company too early, you throw out its birthright. It will never be as big, as grand, or as influential as it might otherwise be. It will be much harder, perhaps impossible, to expand the vision later, when performance is being measured quarter to quarter against operating plans, because then there's too much at stake.
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Lenny was going to have to answer those fundamental questions he had so neatly avoided thus far. Why was he doing this? What was important to him, and what did he care about? Who was he, and how could he express that in his business? I was now curious about the answers.
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In the Deferred Life Plan, by definition, you postpone risking what matters most to you; that happens later, if it happens at all.
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Silicon Valley does not punish business failure. It punishes stupidity, laziness, and dishonesty. Failure is inevitable if you are trying to invent the future. The Valley forgives business failures that arise from natural causes and acts of God: changes, for example, in the market, competition, or technology. The key question here is why a business failed. When you have a big idea as GO had, and you turn out to be years ahead of the market, failure doesn't end careers. Ironically, businesses that fail for acceptable reasons can actually provide a wealth of experience and increased opportunities, as was the case for all the key players at GO.
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Change is certain, and in a world of constant change we actually control very little. When there are important factors outside your control, the risk of failure always looms, no matter how smart or industrious you are. We delude ourselves if we believe that much of life and its key events fall under our control.
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there is only one element in life under our control—our own excellence.
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Here's what I tell the founders in the companies I work with about business risk and success, and what Lenny needs to understand: If you're brilliant, 15 to 20 percent of the risk is removed. If you work twenty-four hours a day, another 15 to 20 percent of the risk is removed. The remaining 60 to 70 percent of business risk will be completely out of your control.
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You don't want to entrust your satisfaction and sense of fulfillment to circumstances outside your control. Instead, base them on the quality of what you do and who you are, not the success of your business per se.
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And then there is the most dangerous risk of all — the risk of spending your life not doing what you want on the bet you can buy yourself the freedom to do it later.
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Work hard, work passionately, but apply your most precious asset—time—to what is most meaningful to you. What are you willing to do for the rest of your life? does not mean, literally, what will you do for the rest of your life? That question would be absurd, given the inevitability of change. No, what the question really asks is, if your life were to end suddenly and unexpectedly tomorrow, would you be able to say you've been doing what you truly care about today? What would you be willing to do for the rest of your life? What would it take to do it right now?
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The plan was a reliable compass, as it should be, not a road map.
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