Sublime

Effectively, to grow a business, the entrepreneur has two choices. The entrepreneur must either be a good enough manager and leader to inspire and receive high performance from his or her employees, or the entrepreneur must remain a functional specialist and find someone else to manage the people.

As technology expands the array of entertainment and consumption options, the value of familiar and trusted brands increases dramatically

Near the end of my stint as an entrepreneur, my friend Henri Verdier (now the chief information officer of the French government) and I wrote a book together: L’Âge de la multitude[177]. We designed it as both a testimonial of what the startup world was all about and a wake-up call for the old world of elected officials, civil servants, and corpora

If I look at our success over the last thirty years, it really comes down to having learned to trust people, to trust their judgment, and to delegate to skilled people.

This matters, argues economist Robert Frank, because ‘our beliefs about human nature help shape human nature itself’.

Present leaders of Century Club companies see themselves as stewards or custodians of the business and feel an obligation to manage the firm in a way that both honors the past and ensures its survival into the future. This deliberate focus on continuity, rather than making a name for themselves, results in real differences in the way old companies

Dean Becker, the CEO of Adaptiv Learning Systems, has been researching and developing