Who We Are, What We Are Doing I

Take an experienced manager/executive, add ambition, sufficient founder- and friend-financing and a great idea and what do you get? Dick (not his real name), an experienced middle/senior manager/executive with a vision: start a global high tech corporation from the get-go.

The goal is simple: grow big, quickly.

The rules are not so simple: weave the customs, habits and laws of the three divergent socio/economic/cultural forces driving the world (Western, Chinese and Indian) into one company, pick the right technologies and content areas, and deliver the how and what at the right time in the right way to the right customers.

The means are brutal: hire and manage a team to hire and manage a team to … in a half-dozen or more countries spanning the globe, travel 200 or more days a year while living in a 24/7 on-call lifestyle, and keep family happy and health good while continuing to do his exacting day job.

Can it be done?
Can he do it?

This blog is his story.

I am his coach. My job is to help him keep things in the proper perspective. Perhaps the biggest challenge Dick faces is finding time to think. When every day is too short to handle Urgent let alone find time for Important, it is frighteningly easy to lose sight of the Big Picture. Perspective used properly is better than liquor or drugs, usually anyway.

Issues, problems, decisions will come at Dick in waves, with no escape. No “quiet time” in airports and airplanes: on phone and crackberry until takeoff, email, spreadsheets and the ubiquitous bad PowerPoint presentations until battery dies (making a seat 110V outlet a curse.) A drink(s), some food and fitful dry-air sleep, then it's crackberry on on touchdown.

We plan to use the full panoply of modern tech to communicate: VOIP, telephone, email and fax as well as webcam video and … who knows what else. I am a soon double nickle (55) and ... I recall the first calculator, $100 bucks in 1973 dollars and the size of romance paper back. I have given up guessing what happens next, only that if it involves a remote my teenage daughter will have to teach me how to use it.

Secrets will be kept secret, duh, but you can expect commentary on a very broad range of subjects, business, personal and just plain bizarre. We hope this blog is much more than a simple record of events, but more an ongoing classroom where we examine, analyze and understand the inevitable stones in Dick’s road to success. By understanding the past, what worked, what didn’t and why, we hope that future stones become more akin to pebbles than boulders.

A quick peek at Amazon shows a host of books about entrepreneurs, so why read this blog? A closer look shows that books fall into two main categories, starting a small company/niche firm or raising money money money. None (?) touch on building a global corporation from the get-go, or even building a global corporation at all. In this “flat world” (thanks Tom Friedman) the gap between local and global is small, and if not every budding entrepreneur has Dick’s ambition, more each year will look beyond the physical walls of geography to the greener pastures of their imagination: in barely more time than it takes to read this sentence global will become the new normal. We hope the lessons we learn will help budding captains of global industry skip the mistakes we made (sigh).

Remember, learning from experience actually means learning from making mistakes, and mistakes at this level are damn expensive. There are two choices: learn from your own mistakes, or learn from ours. I will try to blog interesting, informative, and heck, even humorous stuff at times. It’s been known to happen.