The Seven Habits of Possibly Spectacularly Successful Executives

Introduction

Over at a private LinkedIn newsgroup for ENTP personality types, somebody posted a link to "The Seven Habits of Spectacularly unsuccessful Executives". This is a great article, but not a lot of help IMO, instead of telling what not to do, one might be reversing the reasoning, and try to figure out what to do.

I posted this blurb in a comment on the newsgroup, and I figured I might as well post it on the blog as well...

Here we go:

The Seven Habits of Possibly Spectacularly Successful Executives

#1: Look and interpret the market, you do not control the market, but have to follow it and adapt. 

#2: The project is not an extension of yourself; take some distance and try to be objective. Do not spam your personal peers...

#3: Learn all the time: observe, measure, adjust & iterate 

#4: Positive reviews are great, but it's the negative reviews that enable you to become better 

#5: Image is important, but your business is even more important; do not spend all your time on PR, but ship instead 

#6: Admit it when you are wrong 

#7: What worked in the past might not work in the future 

Conclusion

Looking back at these rules it is obvious: the four marketing P's (Product, Price, Placement, Promotion) have to iterate a lot faster. A product is no longer in a solid state, but in a coninuous process of improvement.

To some of you who know the lean startup approach these habits might sound obvious, but for others it might sound new: the idea is to market your product as soon as possible (even sometimes before you have an actual product), measure the customer's reaction, re-evaluate and iterate... The iteration process has to be very short and agile, so you work in small incremental steps (opposed to the usual BDUF approach)

I think this might be one of the biggest paradigm shifts of the century: the speed by which a product evolves...

If you are interested in the lean approach, I might suggest you to subscribe for the free online course "The Lean Launchpad" that starts in februari over at Stanford University, I know I did.

Signing off,

Tom