How to Fund Growth
July 2, 2015 § Leave a comment
Most organizations’ financial structures are designed for predictability rather than explosive growth.
To change that, we must:
Invest Constructively in Passion
Specifically:
1. Align Incentives
- Learn what people deeply want.
- Articulate how they can pursue that by contributing to the organization’s mission
2. Unleash Talent
- Learn where people are the happiest and most productive.
- Build support systems that allow them to maximize flow.
3. Virtualize Infrastructure
- Learn which essential tasks nobody is able to do efficiently and awesomely.
- Sell those to a business that sees the opportunity.
Transforming the Bay with Christ: A Platform Analysis
February 24, 2015 § 5 Comments
My series of four articles (plus a postscript) analyzing the regional spiritual renewal initiative Transforming the Bay with Christ:
TBC 4: The Process for Products
February 20, 2015 § 3 Comments
In this series I have been building a case that Transforming the Bay with Christ (TBC) should consider reframing itself as a startup building a platform for governance. In this, our final installment, I will discuss the process necessary to build such a product.
One of the key insights about entrepreneurship in the last decade is that a startup is not just a small version of a established business. Rather, a startup is an organization formed to search for a business model, rather than execute one.
In particular, this implies that startups should be designed to maximize learning by exploiting surprises. This is the exact opposite of a traditional business, which attempts to increase predictability by avoiding surprises.
To get the optimal structure, we need to be clear on:
- Which things we need to learn (the problem)
- How we are going to learn them (the process)
- Who will own the learning (the people)
- What will prove we have learned the right lessons (the product)
