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Page 190 GO IT ALONE!
Entrepreneurs must be reinventing their businesses even when everything looks terrific. Once you wait for competition to emerge or for problems to become crystal clear, maintaining your earlier success will be far harder than if you assume that competition will be coming and act accordingly from the beginning. You must always be looking over your shoulder.
Not Recognizing, Acknowledging, and Correcting Mistakes Mistakes are an inherent part of business life, says Finkelstein: “When it comes right down to it, you can’t afford not to take risks. Calculated risks are essential to business. And, by definition, when there are risks, there are mistakes.” However, what distinguishes companies that succeed from those that fail is their ultimate ability to recognize that a serious mistake is happening and to change direction before the ship goes down. Finkelstein writes that serious mistakes “tend to evolve, meaning there really is an opportunity for executives to step in before it’s too late and take action to disrupt the pattern and avoid ultimate failure.” For large companies, he advocates a series of solutions that include “a culture of openness”; establishing “multiple avenues of debate, discussion, and data” so that people have a voice; and creating a learning organization that is open both to new information and to shifts in direction. Recognizing when the business may be caught in a serious mistake is equally critical for a go-it-alone business. The specific solutions, however, must be somewhat different. Finkel-stein’s focus on openness and learning are undoubtedly correct, but what does that mean for a go-it-alone business? It means doing everything you can to constantly validate your assump-tions—talk with customers as much as possible, monitor competitors and marketplace responses to their initiatives, and
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GO IT ALONE! Copyright 2004 by Bruce Judson. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers. All rights reserved.
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