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146. Luca Dellanna on the Power of Adaptation: Adapt or Die

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Ceaseless flux. Those are words Ludwig von Mises used to describe the perpetual change in business conditions that entrepreneurs experience. The consequent need, he told us, is for a process of constant adjustment. The current word for that process is adaptation. Economics For Business talks to Luca Dellanna, a leading business expert who advises companies of all sizes on managing the challenge of continuous adaptation.

Key Takeaways and Actionable Insights

Adaptation is a necessary capacity of all businesses.

Adaptation is a necessity. The marketplace changes, customers change, technology changes. Change is the norm. Firms that don’t adapt will suffer and potentially die, so adaptation must become the norm for business. In complex systems theory, adaptation is the selection of strategies or actions that enhance survival or any other measure of success (or fitness, as its sometimes called) amidst swirling change. In business, adaptation means choosing your degree and pace of change.

Change will be externally imposed if it is not internally embraced.

Businesses can influence the level of change impact. They can critically examine their mental models, and assess their products, processes, beliefs, and people, to evaluate their fitness for adapting to market change. To avoid change being imposed from outside the firm — to avoid negative natural selection, in the evolutionary metaphor – all layers of the firm must embrace change, and proactively adapt. Eliminate unfit products and processes, pursue the development of new ones that are better adapted, and upgrade people resources through thoughtful hiring and active learning.

Adaptation is different than responsiveness — it’s embracing harm.

We talk a lot about a business’s responsiveness to customer wants and preferences, especially when those preferences are fluid and incompletely articulated and require interpretation. Responsiveness is critical — but it’s different from adaptation. It’s response to an external signal. Adaptiveness is embracing change inside the firm.

Luca Dellanna has a striking way of communicating this: he advises his clients to deliberately expose themselves to what he calls “harm” — new problems never before encountered. The exposure must not be to a problem that could overwhelm the firm, but one that can be addressed at a subsidiary level or component level or via adjustment in a shared mental model. Luca calls this “small harm” — specific problems (e.g., the price of a product or service compared to the customer’s willingness to pay). Proactively probe the problem, e.g., in a high pricing test, generate feedback and actively use the learning to adapt. Another word for “small harm” is stressors: situations that put stress on the firm. Set up systems to seek out these stressors so that adaptation is deliberate, and can be enculturated, rather than wait for a crisis that requires an emergency response.

Lack of discomfort is a problem to avoid.

Identify the leading indicators that describe the conditions that will change the future.

Lagging indicators — such as revenue — are metrics that describe the past. There are leading indicators available such as number of customer contacts (describing what the pipeline might look like in the future), and satisfaction scores (describing future repeat sales). Luca recommends pairing one lagging indicator with one leading indicator to develop a metrics system.

This is not the same as popular consultant-proposed metrics systems such as OKR (Objectives and Key Results). Objectives are not leading indicators. The best leading indicators are behaviors, because these can be easily adjusted if observed to be in need of change. Falling behind on objectives does not yield an actionable response if not linked to a causal factor. Inadequate behaviors (e.g., conducting a sales call without following the proven process) can be addressed, especially if they are clearly linked to positive outcomes.

This is the same principle as Amazon’s focus on what they call controllable inputs, and Amazon knows a lot about driving business growth.

There are several strategies to pursue adaptation.

Redundancy (having more than needed): A focus on efficiency and “no waste” can be detrimental to adaptation if it leaves no resources for experimentation and exploration. Employees need time to work on new things, not just on current tasks and issues.

Bottom-up initiatives: Central command and control can’t run everything, anticipate every harm, or plan every experiment. Ensure entrepreneurial empowerment of front-line employees and functions so that they can initiate learning.

Avoid game-over: In experimenting, calibrate the risk to ensure that a negative result is not overwhelming, and, in regular operations, be aware of any possibility of a major crisis — a Black Swan event — and be sure that it will not destroy the firm or deliver a setback from which it will be hard to recover.

Never stop exploring, in a culture of anti-fragility.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb famously coined the term “anti-fragile”. The company that has the most well-developed capacity to learn from problems and harm is the most anti-fragile. The culture of anti-fragility is always to surface problems when they are encountered and address them at the source. Luca stresses that culture is built when everyone in the company can see a consistent set of actions in which the trade-offs of addressing problems are consistent with the stated vision. For example, a culture of safe operations will be reinforced when safety precautions are taken even when the cost, in time or money or both, is high.

The leading indicator is that every individual and every operation and sub-operation is following safe practices, and that the company readily commits resources when a new safety procedure or installation is proven to be effective. If the trade-off is made that the new procedure is effective but too expensive to install, the culture will be punctured because the company has acted contrary to its declared vision.

Additional Resources

“The Power Of Adaptation” (PDF): Download PDF

Read Luca Dellanna’s book, The Power Of Adaptation: Download PDF

Another application of adaptation, Teams Are Adaptive Systems: 12 Principles For Effective Management by Luca Dellanna: Download PDF

Visit Luca Dellanna’s website to find more resources: Luca-Dellanna.com

E-mail Luca at luca@luca-dellanna.com

144. Joe Matarese on Expectations and Building a Culture of Continuous Innovation

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Every company starts as an innovation. Thereafter, the unceasing challenge is to keep innovating because the market continues to change, technology continues to advance and, crucially, customer expectations continue to rise. Economics For Business speaks with Joe Matarese, Executive Chairman of Medicus Healthcare Solutions, about how to build a culture of continuous innovation and overcome the countervailing forces of the status quo.

Key Takeaways And Actionable Insights

Every company starts as an innovation. The challenge is to continue — and ideally accelerate — innovation without pause.

As Joe Matarese puts it, innovation gets you into the game. It’s how every company starts. There’s the identification of a gap in the marketplace and the operationalizing of a new innovation to fill the gap, better than any other competitor or rival entrant.

Innovation is seldom a great new invention or unprecedented leap. It’s more often the day-to-day incremental changes and improvements in products and processes to meet customers’ changing expectations.

The great challenge is to continue or even accelerate innovation as the company grows and expands.

Continuous innovation combines mindset, processes, technology, empathy, and organizational empowerment.

The world is complex and ever-changing. Innovation is necessary for all businesses to keep up or even move ahead. Innovation is not simple, and it’s not easy — in fact it’s a continuous struggle against opposing forces. Joe Matarese has directed innovation from three vantage points: big corporate, startup, and large growth company. To achieve the goal of continuous innovation requires attention to multiple factors:

Mindset: Innovation must be the commitment for everyone in the company. That means always asking the question, “How can we do better?” Such a mindset requires both tolerance of discomfort — since there’s never any rest — and humility in the face of feedback. Innovative companies hire people with these characteristics and cultivate constant vigilance throughout the firm.

Processes: Things get done through the implementation of processes. Innovative are always seeking to improve their processes — make them faster, lower cost, and more efficient in their use of inputs, especially the use of people’s time. Innovation itself is a process, and process improvement is a form of innovation.

Technology: Irrespective of how innovative any one company may be, technology is progressing at an increasing rate of change with potential to render all processes faster, lower cost, and capable of higher quality and fewer errors. One way to ensure continuous innovation is the rapid adoption and early implementation of new technologies as they become available.

Empathy: Even more powerful than technology is the capacity to tap in to customers’ expectations. This is the source of knowledge about future requirements. Customers are experiencing new technology, are absorbing innovation from other firms in the market (whether they are firms that are competitive to yours or simply adjacent), are experiencing change, and their expectations are changing and becoming more demanding by the moment. By sensing their changing expectations, the innovative firm is in position to be a first responder or an innovator before the expectation has even hardened or matured. Being ahead of expectations is a powerful place to be.

Empowerment: People in front line sales and service functions are closest to customers and their expectations. Line operatives are closest to process implementation. Supply chain managers are closest to business partners and vendors. It is these front-line positions that are best placed to deliver information about expectations and what’s changing. They are also best placed to sense dissatisfaction and unease, and to make real-time changes and adjustments. If they are empowered to make changes and to both suggest and implement improvements — even if what they try doesn’t work — they will be more highly motivated and more likely to serve as an internal engine of innovation.

Tools: Joe shares how his company, Medicus, has developed tools for innovation. Internally, all employees have access to communications tools that ensure the customer data they collect, and the ideas they generate as a result, are widely circulated and responded to. Externally, doctor whom Medicus reimburses for services have access to a tool to record their time that is administratively simple and generates fast payment, addressing two measures of unease.

Our Econ4Business.com platform curates many tools for entrepreneurs. One example relevant to this episode is the “Continuous Customer Expectations Monitor” (see Mises.org/E4B_144_PDF2). It guides entrepreneurs through the continuous process of tracking and keeping up with changing customer expectations.

There is a constant counterforce to innovation that the innovative company must recognize and overcome.

There is an innate human resistance to innovation and change. Consider this from a leading brain scientist and psychologist:

When information streams in through our sensory systems, it first stops off at our amygdalae, which are there to ask the question, “Am I safe?” We feel safe in the world when enough of the sensory stimulation coming in feels familiar. When something does not feel familiar, however, our amygdalae tend to label that unfamiliar thing as dangerous, and they respond by triggering our fight-flight-or-play-dead fear response. —Jill Bolte Taylor, Ph.D., Whole Brain Living (Mises.org/E4B_144_Book)

It’s natural in humans to resist change. It may not be safe. It may threaten my job, or my comfortable routine, or generate unwanted uncertainty. Fear of change is real. The function that exercises the fear response in companies is bureaucracy. Bureaucracy exists to ensure compliance with existing rules, and their consistent and uniform implementation. Bureaucracy is anti-innovation.

When a business leader commits to improving a product or process, he or she is undoing what someone else in the firm had championed and nurtured and maintained. It’s a constant battle that must be waged between change and the maintenance of the status quo.

The adoption of new technologies is an effective technique of innovation, but it can also trigger a fear response.

Technology is the continuous innovator’s weapon. It advances at its own pace, as a form of evolutionary advance. Every technological innovation spurs new applications in the marketplace. The adoption of these new technology applications is a catalyst for continuous innovation in the firm, supporting both product and service improvements and the incremental efficiency of processes — faster, leaner, lower cost.

The fear mechanism exhibits itself as employees worrying about their jobs. Perhaps the application of technology will reduce the number of people supporting a particular process from 5 to 4 to 3 or 2 or even one or none. They fear that progress will punish them. They adopt a defensive mindset. The innovator’s goal is to change the mindset to one of anticipation of rewards for progress.

Basic economics tells us that resources which are no longer utilized in a process that is rendered more efficient are thereby released for higher and more productive uses. Innovation leaders can communicate that, and make sure employees know they will be rewarded for progress via new and better opportunities for them to contribute more through the higher productivity that innovation brings.

The greatest resource for continuous innovation comes from customer intimacy and empathy that senses customers’ escalating expectations.

When we talk about a changing marketplace, we are really talking about customer expectations. Innovation elevates customer expectations and thereby triggers the next round of innovation in a never-ending cycle.

For example, now that many people carry iPhones and other smartphones, they’ve become used to unprecedented levels of convenience, interconnection, functionality, and intuitiveness. Their expectations for every other piece of technology they encounter, and every interface they navigate, are raised to a new level. There’s a marketplace of expectations and every new technology raises the bar.

The way to keep pace, and to have any chance of anticipating and meeting the next level of raised expectations is to get as close to the customer as possible, to be with them when they’re using your product or service or technology and listen and empathize when they express a wish (or expectation) that the experience could be easier, better, faster, less frustrating, more enabling. “I wish it were as easy as my iPhone” is the expression of an expectation that everything should be as easy as the iPhone.

Innovating firms build in mechanisms that make continuous innovation not only possible but likely.

There’s a quote in the book Working Backward, about continuous innovation at amazon, to the effect that “Good intentions don’t work, mechanisms do”. The intent to improve a process or product is not enough; people already had good intentions in the first place. Mechanisms turn intentions into actions and achievements. Some of the mechanisms Joe Matarese recommended are:

Mechanisms for taking in data from and about customers: Customer intimacy has a mechanism, in the form of frictionless and unstructured data collection. Give front line employees and the technology they use the unfiltered capacity to gather customer information about their dissatisfactions and report it back.

Let people experiment: The E4B technique of explore and expand applies to everyone in the organization. Elevate experimentation over compliance. That’s the way learning happens.

Eliminate bureaucracy that is not mission-supportive: Every company eventually builds bureaucracies in order to support consistent application of business rules. Innovators differentiate between bureaucracy that is mission-supportive and bureaucracy that is mission-obstructive. HR is often a department where bureaucracy grows. If HR is helping to recruit talented people who will contribute to innovation, then the bureaucracy is mission-supportive. If HR imposes rules that unnecessarily impede innovation, then that part of the bureaucracy should be shut down. The goal is to liberate the value-generating creativity of everyone in the organization, and not to impede it.

Decentralization and entrepreneurial empowerment: Decentralization is a mechanism of innovation. The goal is for your organization to consist of hundreds of individuals thinking creatively and solving problems for customers. You want them all to think and to learn! They must know that the firm cheers them on for doing so.

Additional Resources

“Designing An Organization For Continuous Innovation” (PDF): Download PDF

“Continuous Customer Expectations Monitor” (PDF): Download PDF

Medicus Healthcare Solutions: MedicusHCS.com

Econ4Business.com

Whole Brain Living: The Anatomy of Choice and the Four Characters That Drive Our Life by Jill Bolte Taylor: Mises.org/E4B_144_Book

Don’t Accept False Dichotomies. Entrepreneurs Exercise Integrated Systems Thinking.

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We talk about politicians trying to divide us, but personnel consultants, business advisors, HR executives, and some psychologists are often worse in wanting to divide us into dichotomies. They tell us we’re either creative or logical, but we can’t be both. We are either intuitive or analytical. We have hard skills or soft skills. Some follow the heart, others the mind. The yin is the critical thinking, executive function, intellectual and cognitive side of us, and the yang is the emotional, prosocial, interpersonal side. Those consultants who exhibit a philosophical bent might talk in terms of Apollonian and Dionysian types of thinker – logic, rationality, and analysis versus intuition, feeling, and synthesis.

Some personality tests utilize multiple variables and combine them in characterizing individuals who are subjected to their question banks. The output is said to represent our strengths (versus weaknesses) or typology (we’re this type, not that type). They’re still ultimately dichotomies, arrayed via X and Y axes or 2X2 charts or high-low graphs.

The dichotomy is false. Either/or thinking of any kind is an error, and the error is magnified when classifying human beings. People are complex systems, a dynamic integration of learning, preferences, genetics, family background, experiences, job history, health, and many, many more elements. They can’t be divided into two piles.

The alternative approach is systems thinking. According to Derek and Laura Cabrera in Systems Thinking Made Simple, we all have it in us to be:

  • critical thinkers who can analyze and solve problems;
  • creative thinkers who can see new and innovative solutions to problems;
  • scientific thinkers who can recognize biases;
  • prosocial thinkers who can work well with others and build strong communities;
  • emotionally intelligent individuals, posessing a sense of self and what we offer to the world.

How do we achieve this balance? It’s an emergent property of practicing systems thinking. We can think about how we think, and therefore how we act and how we collaborate with others. Awareness about how we think is essential for the kind of balance and integration the Cabreras advise is possible.

  • Awareness that everything we think about, perceive and experience is the product of our own mental model which is an approximation of the real world. Self-analysis regarding our own mental model – how good or poor an approximation of the real world is it? – is always a good basis for integrated thinking.
  • Awareness of the role of our own emotions, motivations and preferences in the distinctions we draw, the choices we make, and the decisions we take.
  • Awareness that both our own thoughts and those of others are influenced by unique individual perspectives rather than objective analysis.
  • Awareness that there are many ways to organize and interrelate ideas and things and your current way of doing so is just one of many possibilities.
  • Awareness that cognition, emotion and motivation all influence our mental models and our behavior, and the ability to distinguish among them.

Taken together, this integrated awareness constitutes what the Cabreras call metacognition: thinking about how we think. It’s often referred to as emotional intelligence. Insight into our own thoughts is key to high achievement in all domains.

In business, we refer to the individuals who exhibit integrated, balanced, and systems thinking at the highest level as entrepreneurial. Entrepreneurs, those who think about how to create new and higher levels of value for customers, are systems thinkers at their core:

  • They practice empathy, which is the building of mental models of others – i.e. customers – and the running of imagined value propositions through these models to understand their potential to generate a preferred experience that will result in a business success.
  • They translate the insights from these models into a deliverable service, an act of design that calls for the assembly and combination of multiple components, making choices from the customer’s perspective to decide on which elements to include and which to discard.
  • For service delivery to be accepted by customers, entrepreneurs identify all the possible perceived barriers to purchase from the customer’s point of view, and remove them by conceiving of the best-performing mechanisms.
  • They set up, monitor and resond to feedback lops, which is the essence of adaptive systems thinking.

There is no dichotomy in entrepreneurial thinking. It’s not mediated by strengths and weaknesses, and it’s dominated by neither emotion nor reason, but incorporates both. It’s creative and practical, objective and subjective, empathic and self-aware. Entrepreneurs consciously build their own mental models and continuously test them against the reality of the world of economics. The only dualism that’s relevant is what works and what doesn’t in the world of commerce, and these two possibilities are processed together as learning. The goal is durable success, and entrepreneurs exhibit no ambiguity in their assessment of results.

When the consultants and psychologists want to test you to ascertain whether you exhibit the entrepreneurial personality, it’s best to politely decline. There’s nothing of advantage to learn.

Better to focus on and sharpen your systems thinking:

  • Always thinking of the customer first, assessing their system and their place in it, all of the influences on their choices, and all their desires, preferences and dissatisfactions;
  • Working to translate your customer understanding into a deliverable service, which requires you to consider all the elements and components that make up that service, and how to combine them and integrate them in a single value proposition;
  • Identifying all the potential barriers to purchase – whether the barriers are feelings, insuffiicent knowledge, better alternatives, price or lock-in to existing choices. Removing all barriers requires identifying them – and how they work together – first.
  • Setting up feedback loops and adaptive mechanisms so that you can always respond to customer inputs. Develop an adaptive system.

By focusing on these rules, you’ll build an entrepreneurial system that gets stronger and stronger over time.

There’s no dichotomy. it’s not win-lose or strong-weak or logical-emotional. It’s an integration of components and elements into an entrepreneurial system that learns and consistently improves progress towards a goal.

Group Of Nations Embraces Inclusive Entrepreneurship To Reduce Global Poverty.

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In The Ethics Of Capitalism, leading economist Jesus Huerta de Soto argues that the most just society will be the society that most forcefully promotes the entrepreneurial creativity of all the human beings who compose it. When we think of a global society, we can then understand that entrepreneurship is the path away from injustice, and from poverty, for all the world.

At the G7-G20 Solutions Through Inclusivity Virtual Summit on Nov 17, 2021, I’ll be making this case along with my colleagues Dr. Dale Caldwell from Fairleigh Dickinson University and Professor Scott Livengood from Arizona State University.

Entrepreneurship is a philosophy of universal individual creativity and capability. Everyone has a sense of how the world can be made better, and entrepreneurship is the universal method of achieving that betterment. It starts with an attitude that all people share: a continual eagerness to seek out, discover, create or identify new benefits, and better conditions. Economists use the term value – a feeling that the new circumstances suit people better than the status quo. People aim at experiencing value.

Entrepreneurial creativity is a shared activity of consumers and producers. It’s hard to say where it begins, and the co-creation never ends. We might say that consumers or customers initiate the process by expressing dissatisfaction – the feeling that things could be better, and they’re not better yet. They don’t know the solution to their dissatisfaction, and they may not be able to articulate it very well, but they have the feeling. Every human being feels it in some way, every day, everywhere in the world. Dissatisfaction is a universal resource for entrepreneurial initiative.

The role of the entrepreneurial producer is to sense this dissatisfaction. The entrepreneur’s antennae are always up and quivering, scanning the environment for dissatisfaction they can utilize as the source of an idea. There’s a skill for doing this well: we call it empathy. Empathy is the ability to think as if you were inside the customer’s mind, feeling what they are feeling, experiencing their emotions. Empathy can be refined as a business skill, but it’s inherent in everyone. It’s how the human race gets along. It’s the principle behind every trade and every exchange. The entrepreneur understands how to make the customer feel less dissatisfaction, and more satisfaction through trade. The closer the entrepreneur and customer are connected – the deeper the empathy – the better the producer becomes at satisfying the need, and the happier the customer becomes in the confidence that their needs can and will be met.

All of these feelings, this empathy, and this creativity come naturally to people all over the globe. Entrepreneurship is the human condition. It’s the social coordination function of matching people’s most important wants with the available resources and goods and services that fulfill those wants.

Where people might need some help is in implementation of this coordination function. That’s where the concept of Entrepreneur Zones or EZones comes in – the idea that Dr. Caldwell and Professor Livengood and I are presenting to the Group Of Nations. The word “Zones” implies a physical location – and that’s exactly what we envision. An EZone can be located anywhere in the world, and it’s particularly appropriate for the energetic uplifting of a place that is currently in need – a developing nation, for example, or an underdeveloped inner-city in any of the developed countries, or a community anywhere.

One of the steps in EZone development is training – encouraging the entrepreneurial mindset and communicating the steps of the entrepreneurial process. It’s a knowledge process and the requisite knowledge is available to all: it’s subjective (we all have individual knowledge); practical (how to help people); it’s exclusive because it’s individual and that has immense economic value; tacit, meaning it’s not well articulated, but we can draw it out of people through encouragement; and it’s creative, i.e. doesn’t require any resources, it’s developed out of nothing. When people understand the economic worth of their own knowledge, then we can teach them how to apply that knowledge in helping others to improve their lives. There are many pathways available to them. The formal technique is the value proposition, which includes a precise identification of the customer and their wants, and a precise description of what offer the entrepreneur will develop to assuage their wants. This proposition is easily testable – we can teach that, too.

A tested value proposition requires a business model and a development process to bring it to market. The process is also teachable and demonstrable. Part of the process is assembly of resources, including capital, but also supportive services and supply chains. We can teach the assembly methods, and make connections to all the resources, including how to negotiate, contract and collaborate in win-win arrangements.

Professor Livengood teaches entrepreneurship at the university level in the USA, and he has also gained first-hand experience with transferring and recalibrating that training for the poorest displaced refugees in camps in Africa. He discovered that the principles, processes, and practices remain the same, and that language and communication must be fine-tuned to the specific audience, in order to give them the confidence that successful entrepreneurship is in their reach. Dr. Caldwell is an active pastor as well as a university professor, and he has intimate first-hand knowledge of the entrepreneurial potential of people in deprived communities. Both Professor Livengood and Dr. Caldwell exemplify the multi-level applicability of the entrepreneurial method to the pursuit and achievement of prosperity for everyone.

Entrepreneurship is the best path upwards for every community. It’s moral, ethical, and economically sound. Entrepreneurship is the engine of prosperity and growth. It’s exciting and energizing for everyone in the community. The economic gains are broad and deep. Families are strengthened through both shared purpose and reliable income. The kids are better nourished and perform better at school. Violence and anti-social behavior are reduced because people are concentrating on economic opportunity. Jobs are created so that everyone in the community feels their own part of the opportunity. New services are drawn to the EZone, improving the quality of life. Larger companies come to town, attracted by the high-energy workforce and the quality of life in the community. The entrepreneurial community connects to the world and serves markets all over the globe while receiving new inbound services. Improved technology comes to town. Churches enjoy more attendance and their pastors feel renewed. The uplift is general and universal. There’ll be more communities looking over, liking what they see, and jumping on the bandwagon.

You can see the agenda for the Group Of Nations Summit here, register to attend here, and read more about the Solutions Through Inclusivity Summit here.

Six Superior Characteristics Of The Entrepreneurial Society.

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We live in a political society. Politicians and the bureaucrats whom they enable hold all the power. Most people despise them.

Why? Because of their role. They exist to argue over the division of the economic pie that others produce. Politicians despise production and elevate themselves over producers. The fact that they behave badly in the performance of their role merely exacerbates the disdain in which they are held; it is not the primary cause.

The producer role is played by entrepreneurs. That’s the economic term for those who monitor what politicians call (but never truly examine) the will of the people: what people want, what they need, what they prefer, how they feel, what pleases them, and what disappoints them. Entrepreneurs gather this information by listening. They process it through their empathy – the skill of imagining what it’s like to feel what others feel – and decide whether there is a business’s opportunity there. That depends on many variables – the intensity of the need, its durability (how long will it last if unfulfilled), the viability of assembling resources and a business plan to produce a good or a service to meet the need, the likelihood of people buying the solution from one entrepreneur versus another.

Collaboration.

There are important human values at work here. There’s collaboration. People need entrepreneurs to find new ways to solve their problems or meet their needs. Entrepreneurs need customers to channel the market rewards they seek to keep their production going. This symbiosis is the essence of the market system, raising everyone’s boat through the collaboration of buying and selling.

Shared emotion.

There’s the animating emotion of wanting. Human beings act in a conscious way to improve their circumstances. They want something better than what they experience in the present. This is the energy that drives civilization all progress. Consumers want need fulfillment. Entrepreneurs want to feel the fulfillment of acting as the solution source. This is how mutual wants come into alignment in society. 

Listening.

There is listening. There is none of that in politics of course. Yet it’s the core informational input into the entrepreneurial process. The first question in that process is, “What do I know?” Entrepreneurs need continuously updated information about the market, about trends, about preferences, about available options, about pricing, about competitors, and about a thousand other things. They get it through listening. It’s a humble mindset – not dictating or declaring or asserting, not jumping to conclusions, not arguing or contradicting, not wishful thinking, just listening. 

Empathy.

And there is the core entrepreneurial skill of empathy. How can we understand what others feel they need to make their lives better? We all have consciousness but we are not gifted with experiencing the consciousness of others. To be an entrepreneur, it’s necessary to overcome that cognitive barrier. How? It’s a mental modeling process. Entrepreneurs build a mental model of how others – customers – think and feel. It’s not their own mental model, so humility again comes into play – the humility of trying to understand and appreciate another’s point of view. It’s a kind of self-sacrifice – sacrificing one’s own ego in order to feel the way another person feels. 

Sacrifice.

In fact, sacrifice is fundamental to successful entrepreneurship. It takes mental sacrifice to understand others’ needs. Then it requires the sacrifice of time and resources in production to design, assemble and produce the goods and services which will become the value proposition to the customer. To serve others with economic offers and innovation is an ethic of devoting one’s present to the future satisfaction of customers. It’s for this sacrifice, when successful in the eyes of the customer, that the entrepreneur is rewarded. 

Value.

The result is an ever-increasing pool of value. In entrepreneurial economics, value is the customer experience that transpires when the offer made by the entrepreneur is successful in making the customer feel better. Value is a feeling, a good feeling. Entrepreneurs aim to generate value – only the customer can actually create it via their own experience. The more value the entrepreneur generates, the better the customer experience and the greater the ultimate reward to the entrepreneur. The mutuality is self-reinforcing. The whole society is raised up.

A Better Society.

Imagine what society would be like if it were entrepreneurial and not political. It would be characterized by the values of collaboration, emotional sharing, listening, empathy and sacrifice. It would be productive, because entrepreneurs always figure out how to generate more value with less input and fewer resources. It would be about a growing pie for all rather than a political fight over the division and redistribution of the pie. The entrepreneurial society would be much superior to the political society. Let’s work to create it.

139. Fabrice Testa on Super Entrepreneurship

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Entrepreneurship is a method, and it’s also a mindset. Fabrice Testa has written a book that brilliantly integrates the two: he calls the integration “Super Entrepreneurship,” and his book title is therefore Super Entrepreneurship Decoded. He has the appropriate credentials as a proven super-entrepreneur who has created and nurtured numerous great companies (and successfully sold a couple of them).

Fabrice knows the true meaning of the phrase, “The day before something is a breakthrough, it’s a crazy idea”.

Entrepreneurs are animated by their purpose. Super entrepreneurs embrace a massive transformative purpose.

The motivation for entrepreneurs is to help others — to solve problems for others, as we sometimes phrase it. Super entrepreneurs, in Fabrice Testa’s language, are those who choose to dedicate their businesses to solving the biggest problems. By setting big goals, they attract many like-minded partners, collaborators, and employees. By targeting transformation, they aim to change the world in a significant way.

In making this choice, super entrepreneurs are delving deeply into their own personal story to understand their own drivers and their own passionate commitment. There’s a major self-discovery component.

Having set their MTP, super entrepreneurs develop a systematic approach to the pursuit of their goal.

Fabrice Testa recommends that super entrepreneurs combine what he calls CRAZY thinking with a relentless sense of purpose. CRAZY is an acronym for elements of entrepreneurship that Testa calls the Five Secrets. We agreed not to give them away, but they add up to a five-step method entrepreneurs can follow, and a checklist that they can use to assess the market power of their own concepts and business models.

The context for the 5-step method is the exponential rate of growth of available and applicable technologies for entrepreneurship, and the convergence of those technologies that results in a compounding of productivity. When, for example, sensor-based data collection can be combined with A.I. and robotics, whole new fields of automation open up, potentially helping billions of people.

A relentless sense of purpose is a major element in the super entrepreneurial mix.

Super entrepreneurs are highly motivated. They display high levels of ambition and drive, and they generate strong momentum. They seek change, and aim for breakthroughs. They love to set the bar high.

There is a spirit to super entrepreneurship, an intangible spark of super energy and boldness that sets the best entrepreneurs apart and powers them to unusual levels of achievement.

There’s a plan, but it’s not fixed.

Fabrice Testa identifies a master plan for the activities of high-achieving entrepreneurs, but it’s not the restrictive plan of the business school strategist. One term he used was Roadmap: there’s a goal to get from A to B, but it’s OK to visit C, D and E along the way, and to learn and double back and embrace recursive procedures to reach the targeted end-results. The key to success is keeping the goal in mind with flexibility on the route to get there.

Let the customer be the guide.

Testa subscribes to the protocol of involving the customer early and often in the process of designing and building a product or service or a company. Entrepreneurs are always working with assumptions, and, at minimum, must validate them with customers.

He introduced us to the “Starbucks method” of customer validation. Park yourself in Starbucks, order a beverage of your choice, then look around for likely-looking people who might be open to a brief conversation about your idea or proposal or even prototype. It’s easy to engage people, they’re willing to help, and you can offer to buy them a coffee to lubricate the relationship. A few hours investment of your time and a few dollars invested in coffee will result in a deep, broad and rich set of reactions and responses and a meaningful feedback loop.

Success is more about fitting in than it is about timing.

When writers and historians are trying to analyze the unusual success of a particular business, they often attribute a lot of the cause of the outcome to timing — the product or service or technology came along at just the right time. This is a misinterpretation. The happy correspondence of a new offering with a receptive context is not timing but fitting in.

According to Fabrice, to fit in in a big way is to fit in with the zeitgeist of the era. The dictionary definition of zeitgeist is the general intellectual, moral, and cultural climate of an era. What Fabrice is pointing towards is a heightened ability to sense the movement of the time, and the direction of its flow, and to step into that river at the right point.

Entrepreneurship is everywhere, and can be achieved at multiple scales.

Super entrepreneurship is not limited by the scale of resources, but it can certainly be augmented wherever resources are abundant. That’s why we seek to encourage entrepreneurship for individuals, teams, and firms of all size, including the largest corporations. Big companies under-perform at entrepreneurship for two reasons. First, they spawn bureaucracy, which is a form of organization that is counter-entrepreneurial. Second, they have existing businesses to defend and fear the consequences of self-disruption.

The solution is to change the purpose of big corporations so that they can become super-entrepreneurial. The purpose would be to create new businesses with no bureaucracy and separated from the defense mechanisms of existing business units or divisions.

Additional Resources

Super-Entrepreneurship Decoded: 5 Secret Keys to Create Breakthrough Businesses that Change the World by Fabrice Testa: Buy It On Amazon

“Super Entrepreneurship” (PDF): Download PDF