Chapter 5

School of Everything You Need to Know (in an Hour)

ORIENTATION

There were two really big things that Graham Weston and I brought back from our worldwide journey to the find the secret of entrepreneurship. One was the essence—a deeper understanding of the true heart of entrepreneurship. The other was a fresh insight into how to package the principles of entrepreneurial success into a business tool kit that you can carry around with you, starting on day one.

The master principles presented in the chapters that follow are a distillation of hours of discussions with Graham and his partners, years of exposure to Rackspace, and the lessons received from many great mentors—business experts, successful entrepreneurs, teachers and trainers, elite warriors, and many more. They’re principles that could only be articulated after visiting with the obsessive business builders who’ve made Israel into a Start-up Nation, being exposed to ideas like Accelerated Proficiency and Emotional Mechanics, and studying the visceral wisdom of the Navy SEALs and other unique team-makers we were fortunate enough to meet.

So welcome to your first day of school. You may already have a college degree or an MBA, so you’ve been to other schools—but never one quite like this. This is the School of Everything You Need to Know in an Hour, otherwise known as Accelerated Proficiency U. It’s built on the notion that the best businesspeople can tell you everything they know about succeeding—at least, everything they can verbalize—in about an hour. And while there’s a lot of other things they know, they can’t tell you about it because its nonverbal intuition, learned and absorbed through years of trying and doing. And that is the only way to get it.

When you become an entrepreneur, you’ll understand that you’ll never graduate from this school—and you won’t want to, because entrepreneurship is a permanent process of learning above all else. Each time you make a mistake, try out an idea, open a new market, or solve a problem, you learn something. And contrary to what you might hear in business school, the most important lesson to absorb—the lesson that matters more than accounting techniques, business plan mechanics, product development strategies, or anything else—is learning how to succeed with customers. That nonquantitative priority sets you up to keep learning how to do it faster, better, cheaper, smarter on their terms, and always with an eye toward how to make it easier for them, starting from day one and stopping never.

As Bill Clinton once said, entrepreneurship is to “learn and keep comin’.” Once-innovative companies that start falling behind are the ones that have decided to stop learning.

We won’t be providing you with the technical education that you can find in basic books on accounting, finance, and the like. You’re here to get the big principles using the “wax on, wax off” approach. Following these principles is what makes people UnStoppable at key times in their careers. It’s the main reason Rackspace broke away from the competition and eventually took the lead in its category. Rackspace didn’t invent its early technology. It wasn’t the most innovative or well-financed company in the field and certainly not the most well-known. But today, most of its early competitors—which were much bigger companies at the time—are gone or have been absorbed, while Rackspace has surpassed $1 billion in revenue and is number one in its specialty around the world.

Rackspace focused on a few small things that became big things because they kept doing them—constantly getting better and better. That’s all we want you to do.

Last, I may have given you the impression that I look down on aspects of academia and “air-conditioned classrooms,” but you must never think I disdain education. Just the opposite. Education will be the world’s savior and the gateway for new entrepreneurship, not to mention the only way America can compete with other nations that are producing thousands of university graduates every week. MBA programs are very valuable in teaching administrative, financial, and organizational skills that enable scale at big companies, helping them to coax out greater efficiencies.

The point is merely that there is a big distinction between what most academic institutions are about and what our school is about. The difference is summed up very simply: the Optimizers versus the Entrepreneurs.

THE OPTIMIZERS VERSUS THE ENTREPRENEURS

Nothing in nature exists without an opposite. The opposite of Entrepreneur is Optimizer. Teaching the Optimizer mind-set and skills is the traditional default for academic institutions, and it’s the hiring basis for many traditional companies.

It’s important to understand the difference. We like to periodically align ourselves by asking, “Am I acting like an Optimizer or an Entrepreneur here? Am I using Optimizer language or Entrepreneur language? Is the decision I just made what an Optimizer would do, or have I chosen the Entrepreneur’s path?” We ask these kinds of questions all the time, and framing both sides just makes it clearer.

Which One Are You?

An Optimizer’s job is not to encourage disruption within an organization. It’s to keep the organization running smoothly, efficiently, and predictably so that it can sustain itself into the future.

• Optimizers tend to be devoted to process.
• Optimizers create and spread efficiencies.
• Optimizers often outsource their learning, drawing wisdom from outside consultants and acquired businesses.
• Optimizers focus on eliminating weaknesses in employees and in the system.
• Optimizers promote predictability and planning.
• Optimizers like to validate their ideas and strategies with lots of data.
• Optimizers tend to make decisions and pursue changes deliberately and cautiously.
• Optimizers get paid to eliminate risks.

Pay particular attention to that last bullet point. It’s crucial to understanding the difference between Optimizers and Entrepreneurs. Both groups would prefer to avoid risks. But whereas Optimizers build their careers around risk-avoidance, Entrepreneurs know they don’t get paid unless they take risks.

Some Entrepreneurs have a bias against people with the Optimizer mentality, but that’s as foolish as believing that New York City could operate without traffic lights or a municipal code. The fact is that any successful organization—especially one that scales into a big, sophisticated operation—needs the strengths, talents and skills of both Optimizers and Entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs get things moving; they innovate, energize, and promote change. Optimizers bring the consistency and quality control that big companies and mass markets demand.

The problem comes when Optimizers and Entrepreneurs get out of balance in a company—when management spends too much time protecting and honing its big gilded assets and not enough learning, innovating, and keeping the founders’ entrepreneurial spirit alive. In our new economic era of accelerating change, companies will have to keep changing and innovating just to maintain their place in whatever market they’re in. Companies that want to compete will have to keep their entrepreneurial cultures alive in deed, not just in word but in actions, and from the top on down through every level of their organizations.

THE CHALLENGE FOR ANY COMPANY

When a workplace is tipped too much to the Optimizer side, Entrepreneurial employees tend to flee. An entrepreneurial thinker doesn’t always have to be the boss, but she does need the opportunity to think, make, and build, not just manage. If you try to squeeze an Entrepreneur into an Optimizer mold, you’ll lose her. This isn’t just a cultural problem; it’s a big strategic problem for any company large or small that wants to stay competitive in the new era. We’ll address the solution later.

You’re hearing it now because you’ll multiply your chances of success by addressing these issues starting from day one. Even if you’re running a lowly start-up with three employees, start focusing now on how you’re going to keep your entrepreneurial priorities front and center, avoid the pitfall of tilting too far toward the Optimizer side, and develop an entrepreneurial belief culture that will remain intact while you grow to three thousand and then to three hundred thousand employees.

That means growing cultures of learning, innovation, problem-solving, mission focus, true teams, and market savvy—as contrasted with a culture built around bureaucracy, conformity, and control by fear. Entrepreneurial companies are dedicated to giving people first what they want most—including their own employees. Customers want good and fair value from a trusted relationship. Employees want to be valued members of a winning team on an inspiring mission. Striving constantly to provide both is the entrepreneurial way.

OUR MISSION AT ACCELERATED PROFICIENCY U.

Our charter is to teach you the most essential principles of a few core subjects in about an hour each. This will allow you to put yourself in motion and start the process of teaching yourself through hands-on experience as soon as possible. Self-teaching is the highest-yield learning method because it’s custom-fit to your learning style, your strengths, your prior experiences, your immediate challenges, your everything. Physical experience is the mother of emotional mechanics and of learning that stays vibrant over time.

However, teaching yourself does not mean doing it alone. You’ll always receive help from mentors, coaches, and partners. Teaching yourself just means not expecting others to give you the answers because, well, they don’t have the answers. They have their answers . . . which may not be yours.

You find your answers only by being in motion in the real world—by filtering your experiences through your own background and personality.

Finally, as we’ve noted, the Accelerated Proficiency method is built around a Skill Set, a Rules Set, and a Power Set. The skills and rules are three or four fundamentals or rules of thumb—heuristics—that will boost your chances of success while helping you avoid traps and pitfalls. Remember the boat captain who still repeats “red right returning” to himself the 10,000th time he approaches the channel.

Your Power Set begins with your first fearful step into the physical reality—the skydiver’s first step out of a perfectly good airplane, the moment when a rodeo rider first lowers his butt onto the spine of a bull, or the morning when you tell your boss—or maybe even your mom—that you’re quitting your familiar job and joining the start-up full time. It’s the moment you switch from mentally doing to physically doing—from lying on the shore to getting wet in the water. After that, it’s about repetition and the ingrained learning that comes with it.

That’s what you have to look forward to. Thank you for coming to orientation. Starting in the next chapter, we’ll cover exactly what new or even experienced entrepreneurs need to know about ideas, strategies, teams, customers, products, getting famous, and more—each in about an hour.