BE 2.0 (Beyond Entrepreneurship 2.0): Turning Your Business into an Enduring Great Company

Four Basic Principles of Setting Effective Strategy There are four key principles to keep in mind when setting company strategy. The strategy must descend directly from your vision. Remember, it’s impossible to set strategy unless you have a crystal clear idea of what you’re trying to do in the first place. Vision first, then strategy! The strategy

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Of course, all this depends on having the right people. You need people who can argue and debate out of passionate commitment to the success of the enterprise, who argue for the best decisions to help the organization and its cause, not themselves. You need people who would rather see the team win and their argument lose than to see their argument

Here, then, is a basic architecture of executive decision making we found in our research: Determine how much time you have to decide, whether minutes, hours, days, months, or even years. Stimulate dialogue and debate—guided by facts and evidence—to determine the best options. Make a decision, firm and unambiguous, once you’re clear on what must be

You have to sense when you’ve done enough analysis and gathered enough facts. Then get on with it. David Starr Jordan, founding president of Stanford University, captured this perfectly in his approach to decision making: “When all the evidence seems to be in, I like to say yes or no at once and take my chances.”

Making the most of victories is what the flywheel principle is all about (see the previous chapter on The Map for a brief description of the flywheel concept). I’ve come to see the flywheel effect as one of the most important strategic principles to come from all of our research into why some companies become great, why some fail to become great, a

You might try making a decision and living with it for 24 hours without telling anybody. This lets you observe how the decision feels before making it public.

Of course, you need good big bets. The wrong big bets can damage or even cripple a very successful company. So, then, what makes a good big bet distinct from a bad big bet? Empirical validation. This is what the principle “Fire Bullets, Then Cannonballs” from Great by Choice is all about (described previously, in The Map chapter).

In our research, we found no systematic pattern linking executive compensation to the process of companies going from good to great. Financial incentives don’t—indeed cannot—cause companies to achieve greatness, for the simple reason that you cannot turn the wrong people into the right people with money. After all, if someone needs financial incent