Page 24: Commit to Flexibility and Ongoing Innovation

Several years ago Andy Grove, the well-known CEO of Intel, told us, with the title of his book, that Only the Paranoid Survive. There is no question that businesses today operate in an intensely competitive environment. The life cycle for new products is decreasing, and new opportunities arise and disappear with extraordinary speed. How can a solo entrepreneur hope to thrive over the long term?

Go-it-alone entrepreneurs achieve long-term success in part through an ongoing commitment to continuous low-cost innovation and to flexible business systems. By building their infrastructure through low-cost outsourced services that charge monthly subscription rates, these businesses can rapidly adapt to changes in the market and in their perceptions of opportunities.

Flexibility in Action

Peter Drucker is generally regarded as the father of modern management and the nation’s preeminent business philosopher. He believes that it is almost impossible to predict exactly how a business will succeed. In a compendium of his work titled The Essential Drucker, he writes that “when a new venture does succeed, more often than not it is in a market other than the one it was originally intended to serve, with products or services not quite those with which it had set out, bought in large part by customers it did not even think of when it started.”

To thrive amid this uncertainty, Drucker prescribes extraordinary flexibility and an absolute focus on the customer: “If a new venture does not anticipate this, organizing itself to take advantage of the unexpected and unseen markets: if it is not totally market-focused, if not market-driven, then it will succeed only in creating an opportunity for a competitor.” In

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