The law of entropy, in simple 5 year old terms, is the idea that things in the world only become more and more disordered as time passes. For example, your room will not clean itself, and in fact, will only get messier and messier until you intentionally decide to exert the effort to clean it. The egg yolk is another example, once popped, it cannot un-pop itself without massive amounts of effort (if even possible).
I'm beginning to see the same sort of principle in business. A business does not build itself. You cannot expect order to organically rise out of disorder as time passes. It takes huge amounts of concerted effort by many people to put the processes and systems in place to properly set up the infrastructure needed to run and grow a business.
This leads me to my next point: it is of monumental importance to bring people onto your team who are able to contribute to making order out of the chaos that is your startup. There are people (many of them) in leadership positions who almost just sit around and expect the business to scale itself, processes to develop themselves, and crises to resolve themselves. They're the dreadful bosses who just run around barking at everyone, expecting problems to fix themselves without ever really trying to fix things themselves. The danger is that it is common for these people to be very good at looking like they're producing, without really adding much value themselves.
Now, it's unclear to me whether these leaders are unwilling or unable to perform the tasks needed to move the company forward, though my sense is that the latter is the case. The irony is that these "leaders" seem to think everything is just dandy and no real change needs to happen. That is why I believe that it could be the case that they are unable to take the business to the next level; it's because they just don't have any freaking idea. They don't even see how things could be better, the status quo is all they know.
If that is the case, then I don't think these people should be put into leadership positions. Real leaders, as Steve Jobs once said (and I'm going to paraphrase), lead with ideas. In order to keep pushing the envelope of what is possible with your business, you need to first know where to push it to. Blindly pushing may only end up taking you in circles and you begin to wonder why you even tried so hard to go nowhere, or worse, going backwards. Maybe that's why they don't push it anymore, because they just end up at the same place anyway.
I think the lesson here is that everyone really should take a deep look into themselves and maximize the gifts that they were given. No point in getting in other people's ways when they can do it better, and plus, you wouldn't want to miss out on what you could be really really good at anyway.
A business won't build itself so please please please don't get in the way of those who can and are willing.
I'm beginning to see the same sort of principle in business. A business does not build itself. You cannot expect order to organically rise out of disorder as time passes. It takes huge amounts of concerted effort by many people to put the processes and systems in place to properly set up the infrastructure needed to run and grow a business.
This leads me to my next point: it is of monumental importance to bring people onto your team who are able to contribute to making order out of the chaos that is your startup. There are people (many of them) in leadership positions who almost just sit around and expect the business to scale itself, processes to develop themselves, and crises to resolve themselves. They're the dreadful bosses who just run around barking at everyone, expecting problems to fix themselves without ever really trying to fix things themselves. The danger is that it is common for these people to be very good at looking like they're producing, without really adding much value themselves.
Now, it's unclear to me whether these leaders are unwilling or unable to perform the tasks needed to move the company forward, though my sense is that the latter is the case. The irony is that these "leaders" seem to think everything is just dandy and no real change needs to happen. That is why I believe that it could be the case that they are unable to take the business to the next level; it's because they just don't have any freaking idea. They don't even see how things could be better, the status quo is all they know.
If that is the case, then I don't think these people should be put into leadership positions. Real leaders, as Steve Jobs once said (and I'm going to paraphrase), lead with ideas. In order to keep pushing the envelope of what is possible with your business, you need to first know where to push it to. Blindly pushing may only end up taking you in circles and you begin to wonder why you even tried so hard to go nowhere, or worse, going backwards. Maybe that's why they don't push it anymore, because they just end up at the same place anyway.
I think the lesson here is that everyone really should take a deep look into themselves and maximize the gifts that they were given. No point in getting in other people's ways when they can do it better, and plus, you wouldn't want to miss out on what you could be really really good at anyway.
A business won't build itself so please please please don't get in the way of those who can and are willing.
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